5 responses to “Most online discussions now happen off-site”

• Melanie Baker November 17th, 2009 at 22:08

  Hi Dirk — Thanks for the post, and for including us in your digest. Always greatly appreciated to have other folks helping spread the word.

  Couple of clarifications to your post:

  Postrank – which we use internally at Cow for measurement – doesn’t look at raw numbers of people visiting a blog, it looks at engagement.

  Not exactly. In PostRank Analytics, folks can integrate their Google Analytics accounts into their views, and so those more traditional traffic metrics get blended in with social web ones.

  Additionally, for folks who have our widget installed, we can track some of the more traditional metrics, like clicks and views, for their blogs on postrank.com, too. More on that stuff here: About PostRank.

  …no longer do people leave comments at the bottom of an article or post, they are far more likely to click on one of the many ’share this’ buttons that appear on sites to spread content virally via Twitter, Facebook, Digg et al.

  Again, not exactly. Certainly, people are more likely to engage with content socially, but if they’d abandoned comments and the like entirely, we would have removed those metrics from our analysis. As it is, comments remain some of the highest indications of engagement, since they require time and thought (and actually going to the person’s website).

  All in all, though, some really interesting stats and trends. No shortcuts to glory yet, though, aside from regularly publishing quality content.

• Bud Gibson November 17th, 2009 at 23:38

  (I should probably be tweeting this).

  I think the Google and immediate engagement audiences are different. A few observations:

  1. It seems like the least productive way to engage potential customers is through organic search. You have so little control. Google picks your landing page for you. Google picks which site summary text and title to show in search results for you. You show up for the searches Google thinks you’re relevant for, which in turn, is largely based on other people’s opinion (i.e., sites that link to you saying you’re about something).

  2. Paid search advertising makes up for some of these deficiencies by allowing you to choose which search terms you’ll show up for, you can create your own ad text, and you can choose you’re landing page. However, you’re still stuck essentially responding to the searcher’s initiative.

  3. Social media allows you to take the initiative. I think the question with social media is that your reach is likely to be very limited. You have to rely on going through friends and people paying attention to those friends.

• Dirk Singer November 18th, 2009 at 04:38

  Hello Melanie and Bud, thank you for the comments

  I take your points Melanie, yes Google Analytics does integrate with Postrank.

  I guess I was simplifying matters by highlighting that – as I see it – the main event for you guys is the engagement score you give. For that reason of course AdAge introduced you as the main metric for its league table of marketing blogs.

  And again, I was simplifying things when I said that no longer do people comment, they take discussions elsewhere. As your excellent research shows, its a trend not a cut and dried thing.

  I suppose this discussion is proof enough that comments are still very much alive!

  Some good points Bud, completely agree.

• Gavin Heaton November 18th, 2009 at 13:19

  Great post, Dirk. I have been thinking this one over all day. I am wondering if the postrank figures for engagement are skewed by data from the big traffic blogs. It doesn’t seem to correlate with my traffic nor for other sites that I have been involved in. Having said that, Twitter is an extremely useful tool for generating action (by way of traffic etc) for new content, promotions and so on – but I am still seeing tremendous growth in those subscribing via RSS.

• Dirk Singer November 19th, 2009 at 20:26

  Thanks Gavin, really appreciate it – my experience though for my old blog (thisisherd.com) was the opposite. Once AdAge introduced PostRank as the most important metric, I went up the Power 150 a fair amount. I felt PR worked in my favour as a small blogger rather than against me

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