Social Marketing: Brand Engagement on Social Bookmarking

During the SXSW’08 back in March there was plenty of discussion about Social Marketing Strategies Metrics with some suggested areas for metrics to focus on:

1. what motivates your audience to interact with your brand, and 
   
2. what is the focus of those interactions
   

An example of this may be to focus on where and when people interact with your brand and how high or low the level of engagement is. Also, look at time spent with your brand and what people are commenting on. Another way to think of this is…

…even though your brand’s website may have seen a low level of impressions, if those that encounter your brand are engaged by it, then this could be considered a higher success than what a high impression based campaign could provide.

So with these ideas in mind I’ve started some research for 2 groups of companies:

1. Fortune Magazine’s 2008 Top 10 Companies to Work
   
2. Wired’s Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008
   

My approach is simple and I’m sure it needs refinement. I'll take the brand names of these 20 companies and look at how often they are mentioned, bookmarked, commented on and comments rated within the social bookmarking world. For this 1st attempt at statistics I used activity from Digg.com and Reddit.com, the sample includes activity from the 7 months January – July 2008.

My hope is that at the end of this exercise, we’ll know more about were and at what level people are interacting with these 20 brands on social bookmarking sites, away from the traditional corporate site. Then I’ll compare the finding with Alexa.com and Google Trends data.

Okay enough background I better get to work on the numbers.