In this video, Jeremiah and Eric Peterson take us (and Charlene Li) to task on Attention and Engagement.

We are glad that Compete.com made it into their conversation about Attention and Engagement; looks like our Scoble interviews increased awareness of Compete.com’s usefulness for online competitive intelligence and measurement! We’re hell-bent on using our clickstream and survey capabilities to come up with universal metrics in these two areas (frameworks are key, but our view is that marketers need universal measures in order to put their own performance into context - relative to rivals, peers, or anyone else they want to compare themselves to).

Earlier this year, we introduced our Attention metric, and we disagree with the conclusions that Jeremiah and Eric have come to. Attention is a time-based measure, so logically the more time we spend on a site, the more attention we give it. We think of Attention as a pie-chart - its finite - so the sites that are increasing in Attention over time are performing well along this metric. Sure people can cite the issues of multiple browser tabs, etc, but the point is that marketers need an effective way to first identify and then see why sites like www.millsberry.com are so incredibly cool. This General Mills site ranks in the top 1,500 in visitors but leaps into the top 100 in Attention because its members spend over 30 minutes on the site each time they visit it (more than Myspace):

Ask the folks at MillsOnline if they think that total time spent on site is a great way to understand whether they are increasing/sustaining Attention in the marketplace - we bet they’ll say yes.

Here’s another great application of our Attention metric:

Don’t you think this will be a great predictor for which candidates are generating the most momentum between now and Fall 2008?!

Engagement is a different story altogether - and we agree with Jeremiah and Eric. Unlike Attention (a pie-chart), we see Engagement as a spectrum. Worse yet, it is tough to place companies/sites on the same spectrum because of the important “emotional layer” of metrics that need to be considered and that are company/situation specific. Our view is that you necessarily need to use attitudinal inputs gathered via surveys to crack the code on a universal Engagement metric (and we think that Reicheld’s work around advocacy and net promoter scores is a fertile place to begin).

We appreciate Jeremiah and Eric including us in their conversation and would love to advance our approaches with further feedback from them and their collective fans!

About 6 weeks ago, David (Compete’s CTO) spoke with Robert Scoble about Compete’s services, trends he’s seeing in Web traffic and Compete’s new Attention metric.

Robert is one of the most influential bloggers on the planet — the Shaquille O’Neal of the blogosphere. Thank you, Robert, for these awesome videos! Needless to say, we’re huge fans of Robert and the rest of the Podtech crew.

The videos:

A demo of Compete’s Attention metric:

If you have ideas or feedback for Compete.com, please drop us a note!

In my book club, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners is as eagerly anticipated and followed as the Super Bowl. With this being the literary Super Bowl week, I was interested to see if it was just my club or the general public who was following this so closely.

Not surprisingly, Attention for pulitzer.org peaked during April last year when the announcement was made. What was a bit surprising was that last April’s unique visitor total was just over 46,000. This is a story that many people probably hear about through traditional news outlets (especially if that outlet happens to be one of the winners), but the low visitors totals even for the month of the announcement may mean that it is mostly book clubs and not the general public who is watching this so closely.

Continue reading “Pulitzer Prize: Winnings don’t include Internet popularity” »

Somewhere between Instant Messenger Profiles and Vertical “People” search engines, social networking has become a keystone of the web. And much like the beer bearing the same name, it’s cheap, facilitates conversation, and is consumed primarily by younger people. As social networking continues its rapid adoption, the diversification of the social networking sites makes it an important segment to assess.

Continue reading “Top Social Networks: Who’s losing to MySpace” »

For the last few months we have made several posts using a new metric we refer to as Attention. We created our Attention metric because all of us in online marketing need a better way to gauge the influence of a site beyond unique visitors, page views and “visits”. While these are all critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web, they all also have their short comings.

Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.

Today’s Enhancements:

• Attention: Introduction of the only attention-based web metrics
• Daily Data: Monitor site performance on a daily basis
• Velocity: Compare the relative growth of your site to another property
• Visits: Analyze the popularity of a site not only by how many people access it, but also how often they “visit”
• Embeddable Graphs: Easily embed Compete graphs on your web site

Why is Attention Important?

• A site’s influence can be under/over stated by traditional metrics.
• There are only 24 hours in a day – our time is finite. Where we spend our time is where we find the most value.

Notice in the chart above how runescape.com only ranks 436th in unique visitors, yet based on Attention is the 15th most prominent site on the web. If we relied solely on traditional metrics we would overlook the real value and prominence of Runescape.

Above is a Velocity graph of Yelp compared to Yahoo. Although Yahoo saw a 3.8% increase in unique visitor traffic in February the percent of our Attention (e.g. time) we spend on Yahoo has decreased over the last 45 days. Yelp, on the other hand, is attracting more of our Attention every day. Being able to gauge where people’s Attention is migrating is extremely valuable in determining where we can effectively reach and engage an audience.

We wanted to thank all of our users and members for providing us the feedback and encouragement that led us to today’s release. There are over 400,000 people using Compete.com who have requested over 3,000,000 site SnapShots. We receive 10 emails a day suggesting new features/enhancements and we read every one… Thanks for helping make Compete.com the smartest site on the web!

To see the full press release of this announcement click here.

What can I say, I was curious. To satisfy my own curiosity, I set out to answer the big question — Are GigaOm readers any different from those of TechCrunch? You would think they would be similar, right? Not quite. Read on..

How we measured:

We took the Top-20 domains in Jan ‘07 ranked by Attention Share (Attention Share considers all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site). We then separately calculated Attention Share for GigaOm and TechCrunch readers — which gave us a detailed map of where the two segments choose to spend their time online. We then looked at how GigaOm and TechCrunch readers indexed against the Top-20 domains that average U.S. internet consumers spend most time on.

About the sample data:

GigaOm analysis is based on clickstream data from 190 (anonymous) individuals in Compete’s panel that visited Gigaom.com in January. TechCrunch analysis is based on 431 individuals.

Key Observations:

• MySpace.com: Not a big hit with GigaOm and TechCrunch readers compared to the general U.S. craze.
• Yahoo.com: TechCrunch readers spend more time on Yahoo vs. Google.
• Google.com: GigaOm readers spend more time on Google vs. Yahoo.

• Facebook.com: TechCrunch readers love it!
• YouTube.com: TechCrunch readers spend 170% more time on YouTube than the average user. GigaOm readers also love YouTube, indexing 42% over the U.S. average.

• Wikipedia.org: This one was predicable, TechCrunch and GigaOm both love Wikipedia – TechCrunch loves it more.
• Live.com: GigaOm says…. Yawwwwwwn.

Om/Mike Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid