Get the most out of social media, and improve your communication skillz with today’s OneTrueFan site of the day, socialmeteor.com!

Join Troy Janisch as he explores the world of marketing, social media tools and advice that will help you get the biggest impact for your website or business, including interviews with the thought leaders of the industry including Guy Kawasaki and OneTrueFan’s very own Eric Marcoullier! 

Learn how to be 3 times smarter by leveraging your instinct, intellect and intuition, and break out of writers block with ten tips to unblock your blog. Troy also shows you tricks on personal branding, the power of Mad Libs, and ten ways to boost event participation with social media.

Pick up tips that will help your offline life as well, such as clearing up shelf space by digitalizing your music collection, and ten quick ways to make someone else’s Friday better. And catch whats got everyone buzzing across the pond with social media patterns in the UK, and best practices while using foul language online.

Thanks for playing OneTrueFan! 

If you’ve been running the OneTrueFan bar to follow your activity around the Web, as I’ve long extolled and done myself, you’ve gotten used to the ease of sharing great content downstream and racking up achievements, as you work your way to the top of sites’ leaderboard. Today, the serviceintroduced an array of visual enhancements which makes advancement more apparent, but more importantly, connects with your external social networks to find how you rank, not just globally, but against your friends as you travel through the Internet.

Now, instead of simply seeing the global OneTrueFan leaderboard for any site, you can now toggle between this ranking and a “Friends” ranking, which taps the connections you have made on Twitter or Facebook, surfacing the avatars of your buddies, giving you an even better idea of just what your friends are doing online, and what sites they find valuable. This way, even if you’re a house hermit, you’re never truly browsing alone. You can also now, for the first time, invite friends from Twitter andFacebook to join you on that site via the leaderboard, with a few clicks.

OneTrueFan Now Divides Friends From the World’s Rankings

In addition to the friend segmentation, OneTrueFan also made a number of visual tweaks, most apparent to frequent users. Instead of a one-time bar flash that updates you on achievements, the message icon now glows red. When clicked, your most recent accomplishment, from the “Thanks for Sharing!” badge to achieving multiple levels from engagement, to achieving the much-desired OneTrueFan status, will be displayed in a larger, rectangular window, attached to the OTF bar.

The New Badging System on OneTrueFan

The enhancements are pretty slick and welcome for all existing users. It’s always fun for me to find which sites my friends visit, and I’m often surprised when I find unexpected people in unanticipated places. The OTF team, on the heels of their excellent analytics package I discussed last Friday, continues to roll out useful updates.

See who’s hot (and who’s not) with OneTrueFan Fanalytics: Celebrity Edition! OneTrueFan put together a list of the top 25 celebrity gossip websites, and gave them the same treatment as we did for your favorite tech sites, by packing it full of real time data goodness. 

Ride shotgun with the paparazzi as you watch the most juicy gossip unfold in real-time on the live Fan Activity stream and find out what everyones whispering about on Twitter. And take a look at the Most Popular Pages on this Site in the Last 24 Hours to see what everyone will be talking about around the watercooler during your lunch break.

And for you Gossip Girls (and guys) out there, get the latest scoops by keeping on eye on the paparazzi. Slow news day? Take a peek at what everyones buzzing about and you may just find a blind item that missed your radar. Who’s the new rising star of the now? Fanalytics gives you the insight to find out who is the new up and coming troublemakers of LA.

OneTrueFan Fanalytics got you covered in the world of tech, and now the pulse of Hollywood. Are there any other communities we should gather up? Drop us a line and let us know!

Remember those subscriber cards you found tucked into magazines that asked questions about your income, education, sports you liked, where you traveled or what newspapers you read? The editors and advertisers of that magazine were trying to find out more about their readers. Except for the folks that took the time to write in, an editor of a print magazine knew very little about the people who read their magazine.

Imagine if Henry Luce had access to a tool which could give him an insight to the readers of Time Magazine? What if he knew not only who was reading his magazine but also which particular articles were hitting a chord? Not only that, what if he knew what else they were reading in other magazines? Which articles did his most faithful readers found elsewhere that his reporters did notcover? This type of data would have been pure gold to the late Mr. Luce.

Click for full screen image

MyBlogLog had some of this data but it was site-specific and the service has been since scuttled by Yahoo.  The team has re-grouped and pulled another rabbit out of their hat launching Live Fan Analytics (aka: Fan-alytics) as a new approach to site metrics. MyBlogLog required site owners to install a widget on their site to reveal users that have opted in to showing up on the MyBlogLog sidebar. OneTrueFan spins that approach around and asks the readers to add an extension to their browser in order to send back their browsing behavior on any site for aggregation and show a bit of extra love for the sites they frequent.

What’s in it for the Fans? Browse the web and have at your disposal an instant view of the last 10 fans who visited the site and articles on that site that have been shared by those readers. Also look at the top fans who visit the site the most often and see what they have shared on the site. As you browse, your history (minus any sites you choose to exclude), is fed into the OneTrueFan “panel” that helps site owners and other OTF users find interesting content. It’s like being a Nielsen family for the modern age. But there’s a bit of fun too as you’ll find yourself on the leaderboard for your favorite sites vying for the title of the OneTrueFan of that site.

What’s in it for the site owners? Real-time reading behavior. If you install the widget, (as I do on this site) the activity of your readers is aggregated from not only browsers hitting your site but also sharing activity on social sites such as twitter and facebook. You get a more complete view of how your content is shared beyond your site and a sample of what your most avid readers like to read, in real-time.

If your site is publishing multiple stories a day and, as editor you are always looking for the next trending story to cover, the OneTrueFan analytics dashboard is an invaluable tool to help drive your daily editorial calendar. Most blog packages allow you to “pin” a story to the top, above the fold. The dashboard will quickly tell you which ones to push to the top and which ones to let slide down on the scroll.

As social sites begin to drive a greater portion of traffic to your site, it is vital to understand which topics resonate with your readers enough to drive them to share via these networks. OneTrueFan gives you not only quantitative stats but also the qualitative insights that you can only get from browsing the names, faces, and twitter & facebook profiles of your most avid readers. Author Kevin Kelly has a theory that any business is sustainable provided it knows how to take care of it’s most avid fans. He calls it the “1,000 True Fans” rule. OneTrueFan is a tool that will help you cultivate your true fans.

Take a trip though the wetlands on a hunt for pacific northwests most exotic dragonflies with today’s OneTrueFan site of the day, nwdragonflier.blogspot.com

Whether you have a general interest in wildlife but don’t know anything about odonates (most commonly known as dragonflies & damselflies), or you have been looking at odonates for years and can recognize most species you encounter, you will find something on nwdragonflier.blogspot.com that catches your eye.

Jim Johnson’s obsession with dragonflies and damselflies began in 1995 when he was recruited to help out with surveying these insects in Washington state. Since then he has been involved with the Dragonfly Society of the Americas in various ways—most notably since 2004 as an Associate Editor laying out the Society’s publications Argia and Bulletin of American Odonatology, and serving on the Executive Council as a Regular Member from 2005 to 2011.

Posts cover a variety of topics such as life history, behavior, and finding odonates, as well as profiles of particular species, or sometimes just a photo. Jim took up photography of dragonflies and damselflies in 2006 and many of his better photos can be viewed on his web site Odonata.Bogfoot.net.

Jim regularly presents talks and workshops on odonates each year, and have done so for the Audubon Society of Portland, The Wetlands Conservancy, the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, and the Oregon State Arthropod Collection at Oregon State University. Catch him at one of his talks!

Thanks for playing OneTrueFan! 

Yesterday OneTrueFan released a public preview of the company’s Fan Intelligence (aka “Fan-alytics”) solution. If you’ve not seen it, check it out.

While this preview is really cool and exciting - I thought it would be interesting to see how much more someone could get out of it with a little more work.

In this case, I decided it would be interesting to look at the size of each site’s daily engaged fan base not as an absolute number - but as a percentage of their daily user base (daily visitors). This should give an interesting perspective on “engagement rate.”

In this case I’m actually using “engagement rate” to express not what the odds are that a user will “engage” with content on the site. Instead I’m looking to determine what percentage of the user base is passively engaged (‘users’) vs which percentage is actively engaged (‘fans’). The higher the percentage who are fans (who have actively engaged, and are expending social capital in a manner which benefits the site) the better obviously.

To do this I took the data from the OneTrueFan Fan Intelligence system for each of the Top 25 Tech News sites - and then went to Quantcast to get the number of visitors per day for each site.

As it turns out, of the Top 25 only 12 are available on Quantcast. And some of these sites are not quantified. Even with this, the data still yields some interesting results.
Ranking these sites by Reach (daily visitors) gives the following sort:

1. Gizmodo (750k)
2. Mac Rumors (680k)
3. Business Insider (447k)
4. Mashable (379k)
5. Apple Insider (187k)
6. GigaOm (136k)
7. The Next Web (105k)
8. New Scientist (85k)
9. Venturebeat (75k)
10. ReadWriteWeb (75k)
11. Search Engine Land (32k)
12. Tech Dirt (27k)

But once we sort by Engagement Ratio (as defined above) a very different picture emerges. This yields a ranking that looks like:

1. Search Engine Land (3.4%)
2. ReadWriteWeb (3.32%)
3. The Next Web (3.2%)
4. Mashable (2.94%)
5. Tech Dirt (1.58%)
6. GigaOm (1.41%)
7. Venturebeat (1.31%)
8. Business Insider (1.05%)
9. New Scientist (0.77%)
10. Gizmodo (0.29%)
11. Apple Insider (0.26%)
12. Mac Rumors (0.23%)

My gut interpretation of the difference between these two rankings is that engagement ratio is largely driven by two factors.First - the creation of valuable original content. The key words here are “valuable” and “original”. The content needs to be the sort of thing someone is willing to expend social capital on.Second - the publisher needs to understand how fan engagement and the social distribution cycle works.

If you look at the rank by engagement ratio, you’ll see that the publishers who do best not only create original and valuable content but they also understand fan engagement and social mechanics.

Where this gets most interesting is not just in what it points to (strategically) as goals for the publishers ranked lower on this list - but also what it means to advertisers looking to leverage these audiences.
I think this is a great example of what we can do with this sort of information and analysis!

Oh… for shits and giggles I also took the full list and pulled data from Compete wherever I couldn’t get data from Quantcast. Now… obviously this is highly problematic as it’s two different data sources generated with two different methodologies. But I think it’s kind of cool none the less so I will share the results (with the caveats that they’re more interesting than accurate or useful).