Bloggers love metrics. Top 10 lists, unique visitors, comment counts – how’s my blog doing? Numbers might seem easy to understand at a glance, but it can be hard to translate those numbers into stories. And people thrive on stories — what is blogging, after all, but storytelling?

What we really want to figure out is engagement. We want reassurance that we’re not just shouting into the void. Who are we reaching, and what do they think? But most metrics out there only represent individual slices of information, and they only give you numbers, not stories. AideRSS changes that.

At AideRSS, what interests us is social engagement. When content is published online, how are people interacting with it? Reading, sharing, discussing, critiquing — analyzing those forms of engagement gives a true indication of social relevance and influence.

Interests and ideas are great, but our lab is where interests and ideas have to prove themselves. Will it work? And, if it does, how does it help people?

To launch this experiment in measuring social engagement, I needed some starter data. Ideally a set that was well established, not too big, but could still provide some interesting comparisons.

As a Community Manager, the obvious choice was The Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs. Mack Collier has been compiling the list for over two years, so it’s well established. Top 25 feels a bit meatier than Top 10, and because I and others in the community tend to be very familiar with the those folks and their work, I suspected some of our results could be very interesting when compared to Mack’s rankings according to Technorati stats (which only measures links in to each site).

The Viral Garden - Top 25 Marketing and Social Media Blogs

So how did I go about it? With our custom-designed API — sorry, hasn’t been publicly released yet — I analyzed each feed, which accomplished the following:

  1. counted number of posts published in each of the last two months (so essentially for May and June)
  2. counted numbers of each type of engagement we analyze, e.g. 200 clicks, 5 comments, 12 trackbacks, etc.
  3. weighted each engagement type for level of engagement
  4. added up the engagement scores for all engagement types for all blog posts for each month to calculate an overall engagement score for each month
  5. calculated an average engagement score based on dividing total engagement score by number of posts per month
  6. calculated the percentage increase or decrease in engagement for the blog’s content month over month.

And so, without further ado, the results of the analysis…

AideRSS Enagement Ranking (PDF) Detailed Engagement ranking for May-June 08 (Size: 153.4 KB)

The results do differ from the Top 25 list. Seth Godin’s “no comments’ policy isn’t hurting him at all, in fact it’s driving the more heavily weighted forms of engagement. And, perhaps, ultra-frequent blogging doesn’t necessarily help you engage better with your audience.

Fortunately, PostRank analysis of your blog posts can help you see which ones result in the most social engagement online, allowing you to better target content that really resonates with your audience.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think — questions, comments, functionality you’d like to see? Feel free to leave a comment, email me, or ping me on Twitter: @melle or @aiderss.