• MarTech Today
  • Sections
    • Ads
    • Marketing
    • Content
    • Sales
    • Analytics
    • Management
    • Resources
    • More
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Follow
  • MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Mgmt
  • Resources
  • More
  • Events
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

MarTech Today

MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • Resources
  • More
  • Events
  • Newsletters
  • Home
Martech: Management

2017 Hackies Entry: Creating SCALE: Shared Content and Link Evaluation

This article is a guest post by Christopher Penn of SHIFT Communications. It was entered into The Hackies essay contest for the upcoming MarTech conference. Like it? You can register your vote in the contest by sharing it on social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The Challenge Historically, content marketers and communicators have been […]

Scott Brinker on April 19, 2017 at 9:48 am
  • More

This article is a guest post by Christopher Penn of SHIFT Communications. It was entered into The Hackies essay contest for the upcoming MarTech conference. Like it? You can register your vote in the contest by sharing it on social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Challenge

Historically, content marketers and communicators have been frustrated by separate, disconnected content marketing analytics. We have different systems to measure SEO, social sharing, engagement, and quality of content.

We know our efforts pay multiple dividends across channels but lack a single tool that puts everything together in one holistic view. The consequence of these organizational and data silos is disconnected data, data which cannot be used to create strategic insights or address cross-channel marketing problems.

The Idea

SHIFT created SCALE to solve this problem. SCALE, short for Shared Content And Link Evaluation, is a cloud-based software package designed to ingest URL-based marketing data from multiple, disparate data sources, unify the data, and, leveraging best-in-class analytics engines such as Tableau and IBM Watson Analytics, provide actionable insights from data.

With SCALE, organizations can ascertain not only the effectiveness of earned media hits for themselves, but also gain competitive insights about what content resonates on competitors’ owned and earned media properties.

The Execution

SCALE was built on an open source platform with MySQL, PHP 7 and ubuntu linux. It pulls organic search marketing data from the MOZ Open Site Explorer API and SEMRush. as well as multiple social APIs, including: Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Stumble Upon and Google+.

SCALE also includes readability data via an open-source PHP implementation of the Flesch-Kincaid readability algorithm.

The first iteration of SCALE was for social scanning only. You would feed in URLs and receive an output of how many times that URL had been shared on social. We quickly realized, however, that such information was only part of the big-picture answer. Over time, we’ve continued to iterate and improve the product. After becoming founding members of IBM Watson’s Key Opinion Leader Program, we again iterated on SCALE to provide a new layer of qualitative context to our quantitative output.

In addition to ingesting multiple data sources, SCALE includes a series of ETL processes. Upon import, data from various APIs is normalized and cleaned; for example, many APIs use different timestamps to record dates. After cleaning, data is imported in the database, and a 41-step automated process transforms it into a denormalized warehouse. Once denormalized, the SCALE data is extracted either by script or by analysts, then analyzed, formatted, and prepared for client usage.

User Benefits

Using SCALE, organizations enjoy one or more of the following benefits:

  • Earned media: Organizations can identify which coverage creates the most social engagement, provides the greatest organic search benefit, or shows the highest content engagement rate. Organizations can then tunes their efforts based on these findings.
  • Owned media: Organizations can identify which website and owned digital property content resonates the most, which is the most well-rounded, and which is underperforming. Clients can then repair poorly performing content to reap greater digital marketing ROI.
  • Competitive analysis: Organizations can determine which subjects, topics, and content resonate most with their target audiences compared to competitors, then adjust their content marketing program to mitigate competitive threats or seize opportunities.

Depending on the depth of each SCALE report, the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, via Google’s data science team, Think With Google, can also be used to provide additional context and recommendations. This tool identifies how customers of companies of various side and industries use digital channels to become aware of them, learn more about them, and engage with them.

For example, in the image below, customers first learn about a company on the far left, interact with them in the middle, and eventually buy from them on the right. The colored circles indicate which channels they use; when stacked, they use those channels simultaneously. So, if we were to run a SCALE report for a large company in the industrial space and determine they had a tentpole SEO strategy and virtually no social shares, we’d recommend they improve and diversify owned and social content.

SCALE: Example

Below, please find a sample, sanitized SCALE report of comparing two large B2B security companies:

What did you think of this article as an entry in The Hackies essay contest for the upcoming MarTech conference? If you liked it, you can register your vote in the contest by sharing it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Scott Brinker
Scott Brinker is the conference chair of the MarTech® Conference, a vendor-agnostic marketing technology conference and trade show series produced by MarTech Today's parent company, Third Door Media. The MarTech event grew out of Brinker's blog, chiefmartec.com, which has chronicled the rise of marketing technology and its changing marketing strategy, management and culture since 2008. In addition to his work on MarTech, Scott serves as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.

Related Topics

Channel: Martech: ManagementMarTech Conference

Subscribe to receive daily martech news and expert insights. See terms.


We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.
See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS

MarTech 2021: March 16-17

MarTech 2021: Sept. 14-15

MarTech 2020: Watch On-Demand

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

White Papers

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Omnichannel Marketing using Marketing Automation
  • The Top Five Objections That Hold Companies Back From Doing SEO
  • How To Optimize SEO With UGC
  • Email Tune-Up: A 5-Point Inspection to Get Your Program in Gear
  • Digital Marketing Report Q4 2020: Benchmarks and Insights for 2021
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • The Secret Behind SEO Success: Predict Rank with the Power of Data Science
  • How to Avoid the Digital Transformation Trap
  • How to Build a Marketing System of Record
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • Local Marketing Solutions for Multi-Location Businesses
  • Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms
  • Identity Resolution Platforms
  • Customer Data Platforms
  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
See More Research

Receive daily martech news and analysis.
Martech Today
Download the Martech Today app on iTunes
Download the Martech Today App on Google Play

Channels

  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Commerce
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech
  • SMX

Resources

  • White Papers
  • Research
  • Webinars
  • MarTech Conference

About

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff
  • Connect With Us

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • iOS App
  • Google Play

© 2021 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Your privacy means the world to us. We share your personal information only when you give us explicit permission to do so, and confirm we have your permission each time. Learn more by viewing our privacy policy.Ok