Just when you thought Google blogs and Twitter search would be a good way to measure engagement for your publications, important, prevalent and significant communities are popping up quicker than they are being discovered & tracked by most people.
This has been one of the joys of discovery with Magma. There is a lot of action out there that no one is seeing or talking about – the kind of chatter that should be getting people pretty excited.
Consider A few examples.
TUMBLR
My blog here at Dembot used to be a PHP blog that I built myself, then it was a Moveable Type blog, then it was a Word Press blog, and now its a Tumblr blog but in each case, it looks about exactly the same (i.e. you may not know or care that my blog is tumblr blog unless you have one yourself).
The reason why I am on Tumblr is because in addition to the RSS readers I have built up, I have found that there is an additional audience of people on Tumblr that subscribe to my blog via tumblr, and thus can easily reblog posts to their communities.
For example, see this post below, most of which was not tracked by Google, Technorati or others.
VIMEO
While no doubt about it, YouTube is where the party is at for the majority of the people and the search, etc., other platforms are enduring and becoming more and more significant. At Rocketboom, for example, we dont upload most of our videos to Vimeo, but we do upload our Know Your Meme series. While these view counts are still small by some standards, every audience member that sees one of our videos is pretty damn important to us and we are finding it very worthwhile to be there.
FRIENDFEED
The below is a good example of another niche community that is significant. With regards to the below video which I posted, most all of this chatter and the views generated by this embed are not discoverable without special attention.
Note above that on the FF platform, when a YouTube video loads (i.e. when the image is clicked on, it then loads the YT video and auto-plays. This means that the video will not receive a count. In other words, **almost all videos that are embeded on all of friend-feed are not reported! **. That is a lot of missed views & activity that the video business should know about because they are missing out on accounting for all this value.
DELICIOUS
Of course del.icio.us is a bit more obvious because its been around for a long time, but it should not be forgotten.
What are some examples you know of that are relevant, for being significant communities but not so obvious?
