How to quantify social media reach and influence is becoming the top topic in conversations I’m having with agrimarketers. It’s not an easy one to answer. You can’t rely on website statistics to tell you the whole story. How do you factor in Twitter, Facebook and something that I have mixed feelings about. That is the re-publishing of my content.

Let’s take Hoosier Farmers as an example. The website says “Hoosier Farmers is a site from the Noblesville Daily Times designed to provide news and links of interest to Indiana farmers.” What it’s actually doing is re-publishing AgWired along with some other content from other sources. I found this in a Google search a couple days ago. There are actually quite a few websites doing this with AgWired and other ZimmComm properties. Sometimes they “scrape” all my posts. Sometimes just selected ones of interest to their audience. Usually they provide links back to AgWired. I think this raises a number of questions.

Should I be upset or pleased? How can I figure their traffic in my statistics since I don’t know it? How can I use knowledge of this to my benefit and the benefit of my clients?

I said I have mixed feelings because I have invested a lot of work in the content I produce and someone else is using it to attract traffic to their website. However, my clients want maximum exposure and this is one way it’s happening. I highly encourage ag media in particular to utilize pictures and audio they find on AgWired. Hopefully that helps them and my clients who are usually the subject of the content. I know we get plenty of anecdotal feedback that this is happening. Good. But that does seem a little different than the wholesale re-publishing of everything we post.

How about you? Is this a good thing or something else? Do you have the same “problem?”