STI OC Result

1. STI INTERNATIONAL
STI INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY
ON ON-LINE IMPACT
MEASUREMENT
Carmen Brenner and Birgit Leiter
STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck,
Technikerstraße 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
firstname.lastname@sti2.at
2012-05-21
SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE INTERNATIONAL
STI INTERNATIONAL
Amerlingstrasse 19/35
A - 1060 Vienna
Austria
http://www.sti2.org

2. 2
STI INTERNATIONAL
Abstract. The following document will describe the different on-line
presences of STI International and go into detail on the possibilities on how to
measure the impact that was achieved through these different channels. The
channels cover the STI International Web site as well as different the
organization’s profiles on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter
and Co.

3. 3
Table of Figures.......................................................................................................................................................4
1 Introduction......................................................................................................................................................5
2 Web site...............................................................................................................................................................5
2.1 Statistics for www.sti2.org - January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011 ...........................................5
3 Facebook.............................................................................................................................................................7
4 Google+................................................................................................................................................................8
5 Twitter.................................................................................................................................................................9
6 YouTube..............................................................................................................................................................9
7 LinkedIn...........................................................................................................................................................10
8 XING...................................................................................................................................................................11
9 Slideshare........................................................................................................................................................11
10 Summary.......................................................................................................................................................11

4. 4
Table of Figures
Figure 1 - Overall Web site statistics for sti2.org (Jan 01,2011 - Dec 31, 2011)...................... 6
Figure 2 - Demography of Web site visitors (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)............................ 6
Figure 3 - Traffic sources (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)........................................................ 6
Figure 4 - Top 15 search terms (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)............................................... 7
Figure 5 - The STI International Facebook page .................................................................... 8
Figure 6 - The statistics of the STI International YouTube channel...................................... 10
Figure 7 - The profile of STI International on the professional network XING..................... 11

5. 5
1 Introduction
Online presence has become more and more important in the last few years and especially
with the popularity of social networks like Facebook to only have a simple Web site is no
longer sufficient. Beside having a website, STI International is also present on several social
(media) platforms including Facebook and Google+ to better engage with interested parties.
Furthermore STI International has a presence on YouTube, Twitter, Slideshare, LinkedIn and
XING.
It is not only important to establish an online presence but also to keep an eye on the impact
your presence has on the online community. Therefore STI International tries to analyze its
impact in the various channels with the help of free tools and services on a regular basis. In
the following we will shortly describe the different online presences of STI International and
the means to measure their impact.
The document will be structured as follows. Section 2 will go into detail on the visitor
statistics for the STI International Web site. In Section 3 to 5 the online presences of STI
International on the social media platforms Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will be discussed.
Section 6 introduces the Youtube channel for STI International. The professional networks
LinkedIn and Xing are presented in section 7 and 8, and Slideshare in section 9. At last, some
key findings are presented.
2 Web site
The core part of the online presence of STI International is the Web site available at
http://www.sti2.org. It is based on the content management system (CMS) Drupal 7 and
offers all information on the organization, its mission and its members. Beside static (not
often changing) data, visitors can also get news and events organized by STI International on
the Web site.
In order to track the visitors and their behavior, we use Google Analytics1
, a most popular,
free statistics tool developed by Google. It allows very detailed insights into the browsing
behavior of visitors such as their visiting times, their entry and exit pages, their destinations
etc.
2.1 Statistics for www.sti2.org - January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011
The Web site of STI International had 16,948 visits in total from January 1, 2011 to
December 31, 2011 of which were 12,176 unique visitors. 29.55% of all visits were
returning visitors. In average a visitor watched 2.80 pages during the visit of the STI
International Web site and stayed 2:40 minutes.
1
http://www.google.com/analytics/

6. 6
        
      
           
      
            
    
    
    
          
     
     
                         
           
         
          
          
        
         
       
        
        
         
                        
          
                   
              
             
                      
             
               
              
           
                   
          
       
      
                 
Figure 1 - Overall Web site statistics for sti2.org (Jan 01,2011 - Dec 31, 2011)
The most visitors of the STI International Web site came from Austria (16.51%), the United
States (12.59%), Germany (8.41%), and the United Kingdom (6.65%). A bounce rate of
54.91% is in the average.
        
      
           
      
            
    
    
    
          
     
     
                         
           
         
          
          
        
         
       
        
        
         
       
                        
          
                   
              
             
                      
             
               
              
           
                   
          
       
      
     
                 
  
    
                   
Figure 2 - Demography of Web site visitors (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)
42.24% of the traffic came from search engines like Google, 29.16% were referral traffic
where the STI International Web site was linked on another Web site (e.g. 1,318 visits from
youtube.com, 361 visits from sti-innsbruck.at) and 27.87% of the traffic came from direct
traffic.
Figure 3 - Traffic sources (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)

7. 7
The Top 5 search terms that brought visitors to the Web site were “sti international”, “sti2”,
“sti”, “www.sti2.org” and “sti2.org”. Especially the search terms “sti” and “sti guns” had an
expected high Bounce Rate2
as people using these keywords were very likely searching for
the STI International Guns company3
.
        
                                            
                             
                              
                                   
                                 
                                     
                                                    
                                                     
                                      
                                                        
                                                                  
                                                     
                                       
                                   
                                   
                                     
                                                          
                                  
                                                 
                                          
                                                 
                               
                                           
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                                                      
Figure 4 - Top 15 search terms (Jan 01, 2011 - Dec 31, 2011)
3 Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms and offers features as profiles for
individuals, interest groups, fan pages, and events. Replacing the old STI International
Facebook group, a Facebook fan page was created. The page is available at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Semantic-Technology-Institute-International/ since August
29, 2011.
Additionally to the Facebook Likes, Facebook offers a statistic feature called “Facebook
Insight” since July 19, 2011 that allows to see your impact in more detail, e.g. the weekly
reach of a Facebook page, who is talking about it and the reach of single posts made. The
Facebook insight statistics only covers time spans of 89 days (maximum).
Since the creation of the STI International Facebook page, it has 74 Likes (May 12, 2012),
23,484 Friends of Fans4
and 20 individual posts were published there. In average, 5 people
each week talked about the STI International Facebook page5
and 67 people each week were
reached6
.
2
The Bounce rate describes the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person
left the site from the entrance (landing) page.
3
http://www.stiguns.com/
4
“The number of unique people who were friends with people who liked your Page as of
12/5/2012”.
5
“The number of unique people who have created a story about your Page from. A story is
created when someone likes your Page; posts to your Page Wall; likes, comments on or shares

8. 8
Figure 5 - The STI International Facebook page
4 Google+
Another rather new social media platform where STI International is engaging interested
parties is Google+. The Google+ page for STI International is available at
https://plus.google.com/b/113671443303514151965/113671443303514151965/. This
platform developed by Google is under heavy development (especially on a features basis),
and more and more people are joining it every day. Still, the features offered are not
comparable to the variety of possibilities one has with Facebook, e.g. there are no user
developed apps.
Google+ doesn’t offer s real statistics features (yet). Only the so-called “+1” (similar to the
Facebook Likes) are an indication of your impact, and the people that have you in a Circle7
can be tracked. STI International is in the Circles of 22 persons and has 45 “+1” by May 12,
2012.
one of your Page posts; answers a question you posted; responds to your event; mentions your
Page; tags your Page in a photo; checks in at your Place; or recommends your Place.”
6
“The number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page. This
includes Adverts and Sponsored Stories that point to your Page.”
7
Circles on Google+ are similar to interest groups. A person can have an infinite number of
Circles and add profiles and pages to them.

9. 9
5 Twitter
A very strong part in the Online Engagement of STI International plays the micro-blogging
service Twitter. With its 140 character long messages called tweets, it is a very dynamic tool
and ideal for disseminating news.
The Twitter profile of STI International can be found at https://twitter.com/#!/sti2. All news
from the Web site are automatically pushed to Twitter.
Tracking the impact and feedback via Twitter is quite easy if you only count posted tweets
and followers. STI International has written 177 tweets via Twitter and has 166 followers.
If one wants to get more details on how often a specific hash tag or the STI International
account name @sti2 was mentioned it becomes more difficult as Twitter only offers tweets
that are not older than a month in its search and all third-party tools like Topsy’s Social
Analytics tool8
use the standard Twitter search.
Twitter newly introduced a non-free service called “Twitter for Business”9
that supports
more detailed statistics and specializes on the impact factor of advertisement on Twitter.
Twitter for Businesses is currently in development and most of its features like “Promoted
Trends” or “Promoted Tweets” are still in a beta phase, only available for a selected group of
advertisers.
Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t offer any information on the costs of these new services what
suggests that the advertisement plans are tailored to the needs of the costumers. In December
2011, a leaked email from the Twitter advertisement department but revealed that the costs of
advertisements over Twitter are quite expensive10
.
6 YouTube
YouTube is a very popular video platform where STI International is present since October
15, 2009 and published three videos by now. The YouTube channel of STI International is
available at https://www.youtube.com/user/semantictechnology/. It has 447 subscribers and
overall 196,195 video views.
8
http://analytics.topsy.com/
9
http://business.twitter.com/
10
http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/12/08/twitter-leak-reveals-costs-brands-follower

10. 10
Figure 6 - The statistics of the STI International YouTube channel
The three videos published on the STI International YouTube channel are:
The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=off08As3siM
SOA4All in the Future Internet of Services:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ia8Fg8BDbQ
LarKC – Large Knowledge Collider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUbbl4cnAE
Together they have 760 Likes and 49 Dislikes, were commented 195 times and shared 265
times, and were added to a favorite list 1,334 times.
7 LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional network that allows companies to present themselves to the public,
and to engage with their current and future employees and their costumers. The platform
supports company profiles and profiles for individuals, and is the most used network for
professionals.
STI International has its own profile on LinkedIn that is available at
http://www.linkedin.com/company/sti-international_2. The company profile has 24 followers
and 6 so-called 1st
Connections.

11. 11
8 XING
Similar to LinkedIn, XING is a professional network that is very popular in the German
speaking countries. STI International’s profile is available at
https://www.xing.com/companies/stiinternational/ and it has 6 followers.
9 Slideshare
Slideshare is a social platform for sharing presentations, documents, PDFs, videos and
webinars. It offers features as textual content extraction, embedding of presentations, and
social media sharing.
The statistics for free accounts allow to see the number of Views (Embeded, on Slideshare),
Favorites, Downloads, and Comments for individual presentations. Pro accounts get more
detailed statistics such as an analytics summary, statistics per presentation, or latest tweets
that mention one of your presentations. Slideshare Pro accounts start at €19 per month.
STI International’s Slideshare profile is available at
http://www.slideshare.net/STI_International, but is obviously not used, and it has therefore
only five followers. There is one presentation with the name “STI International marketing
presentation” online, uploaded August 2011 with 390 views.
10 Summary
STI International is present on the Internet with a Web site and on a number of social
platforms that we have discussed before. The center of the STI International on-line presence
is still the Web site where interested parties will always find the newest information. The
organization’s naming ambiguousness with a major gun company and a disease obviously
leads to visits of the Web site that are not intended, but nonetheless the number of visitors that
stay and inform themselves about STI International is quite decent.
Figure 7 - The profile of STI International on the professional network XING

12. 12
The social media platforms are becoming more important and engage additional people. The
strongest impact of these social media platforms was achieved through Twitter, Facebook and
YouTube.
As already mentioned, Twitter is the ideal medium to post short messages and news. The
Twitter stream of STI International is mostly automatically filled via Web site to reflect
updates there.
Facebook on the other hand can ideally be used to further strengthen the connection with
interested parties, members and partners. It might be a good tool to present the activities of
STI International to a more diverse public by making use of the features offered by Facebook,
e.g. photos, videos and events.
The impact and reach of the STI International profile on Google+ is difficult to measure. As
the social platform doesn’t offer a lot of features, it is at the moment rather static. It still needs
to be seen in which direction the platform will develop and what advantage can be gained
through it for STI International.
The very high numbers of views and back links to the Web site that were achieved through
YouTube speak are clear message that people like to watch well made videos on technical
innovations, and this direction should further be driven in the future.
The profiles of STI International on the professional platforms LinkedIn and Xing are fine as
they are and could only be extended with company news. It might also be interesting to use
the possibility to create events to further engage with interested parties.
Finally, STI International has a Slideshare profile, but that is not used at all. It would
definitely be a good idea to strengthen the presence there by adding presentations of different
STI events such as the STI Summits, Board meeting, etc.