Often  a topic of discussion: How do you measure the success of your social marketing efforts? The most common idea I have heard over the last year is to wrap all of your efforts up in to one word, “engagement”.  And in this meaning, engagement includes, visits to your site, how many unique visitors, how often they came back, how log each visit session is on average. All of these are pretty basic web traffic measurements. However, if you add to these the measure of the number of people posting, commenting, and re syndicating your content you gain greater insight. At least that is the goal.

Their is a race out there to not only to establish an engagement measuring platform but also to simply define what engagement measurement is.

PostRank.comhas taken a step in that effort. PostRank.com website clearly states that is aims to “measure audience engagement” Interestingly it has begun to dissect what online engagement is and how measure different areas of engagement.

The 5 C’s of Engagement

• Creating
• Critiquing
• Chatting
• Collecting
• Clicking

Who knows if they have it right., but it is interesting to see the evolution of engagement metrics.

Post Rank integrates and measures via the following:

• RSS Feed Analytics similar to feedburner
• Integration with RSS Readers including Newsgator, Google Reader, Trawlr, Daisy Feed, FetchIt! and more
• Simple integration with major blogging platforms, Blogger, WordPress Typepad
• An API and developers section of it’s website.

What is not clear after my limited browsing of the is does this scale? Can this be easily implemented into a network of blogs or a  large scale community that goes beyond blogs and includes, forums, galleries and so on. Either way it will be interesting to follow and see how it evolves. Postrank has a BETA program for “Feed Analytics”. Go here to sign up.