PostRank is a world-class technology company that monitors and collects social engagement events with online content in real-time across the web. They focus on gathering where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs. Online publishers and people interested in their content use PostRank data and analytics to gauge the influence and authority of the stories, site and content creators by measuring their reach with social audiences.

PostRank is a completely web based company. Anyone publishing content online and anyone interested in those publishers can make significant use of PostRank’s products. For PostRank, there truly are no geographic boundaries.

Locating in Waterloo Region was a natural decision for the company. Founder Ilya Grigorik (pictured left), was just completing his degree at the University of Waterloo when he started the company. Continuing to grow the business in Canada’s Technology Triangle was also an easy decision; there is a tremendous amount of support for early stage companies and a vast pool of local talent to choose from.

A very talented and diverse team make up the staff of PostRank, a team that hails from different parts of the world and has different educational backgrounds. Their core development team is grounded, naturally, in computer science. The company hires locally; however, whenever they find good people, geography is not a concern. PostRank has significant success getting people to move to the Region to be part of their team. Employees, including co-op students, have consistently expressed an appreciation for the fact that they get to participate in all aspects of the software development. They are a great example of how agile development can work really well to achieve results and empower people to choose tasks that are out of their comfort zone.

PostRank collects around 4 million stories a day that are published to the most interesting and highly engaging websites on the internet. At the same time they track, in real-time, 20 million social interactions occurring per day with each of those stories (tweets, comments, diggs etc.). There is a massive amount of intelligence in that data for corporate enterprise. From brands looking for the most influential authors in their topic areas (for the purpose of promotions or campaigns) to ad networks using social engagement data for ad pricing, to corporate marketers tracking where and how their own content is resonating with an audience, there are a multitude of ways that all corporations can get value from information derived from the social web.

In an effort to continue to be collaborative, they have approached a few local companies to help test out some new products and services that they have launched – this support has been invaluable. In addition, they talk to other local startups all the time to stay abreast of what’s going on locally and in other parts of the world that might be relevant to them.

“Starting a web company is cheap and easy compared to starting a more traditional business because you essentially need a laptop, an internet connection and computer science talent. So we’re constantly having to innovate to stay ahead of the pack,” commented Carol Leaman, CEO, PostRank. “PostRank (and Ilya specifically) was definitely visionary in terms of understanding the value of tracking social media, and many others have validated that concept since.”

Watching trends and constantly trying to assess where the market is headed when you’re working in a relatively new space is tough, but it’s essential if you’re going to succeed in the long term. PostRank is constantly thinking about and executing on that. They are always connecting with companies that they feel they can learn from in terms of identifying market needs, or partner with to help achieve a larger objective.

For a relatively small company based in Waterloo, many times in the last year and a half they have attended conferences in other parts of the world and have discovered people who know about them and Waterloo Region. “We’ve landed on a quite a number of “up and coming technology companies to watch” type of lists. All of those things are confirmation that we’re doing the right things, they make sense, and they’re providing value to people,” said Carol. “It keeps us motivated and excited to keep going!”

“PostRank services are used globally. We’ve got customers in more than 130 countries, and have millions of individual users around the world. We often get asked where we’re located, and it’s always a pleasure to be able to highlight Waterloo Region as a centre of innovation. Increasingly the people we talk to know about Waterloo, and as a unique digital media company in this area our presence here helps bring much deserved notice and credibility to the Region.”

Sources:
• Interview Carol Leaman | 2010
• www.postrank.com