Dive Brief:

• Mashable created a tool, Knowledge Graph, that tracks how branded content on its site is shared across a variety of channels including social media, email and text messaging.
• The tool has been tested by MasterCard with its recent series of advertorials on Mashable’s site.
• Knowledge Graph visually shows marketers how content is shared from tweets, to retweets, Facebook posts and even via email sends and text messages.

Dive Insight:

"It's early days for this kind of data," Mashable CTO Robyn Peterson told AdAge. "There's just a lot we need to learn and look at before we come up with super concrete steps.At this point the really interesting thing is it tells you what's driving success in general and then what's driving your success on the networks and then where there's opportunity."

Knowledge Graph should interest marketers because it offers insight into difficult to track shares by going beyond just social media and getting into viral sharing in email and texting. For consumers, they can rest easy that the data provided to publishers is anonymized so people who are sharing content cannot be targeted with any additional marketing.

BuzzFeed has a similar tool called Pound, and internally Mashable jokingly called its version “kilogram” according to Peterson. Knowledge Graph was modeled after Mashable's other virality-measuring tool, Velocity, which can even predict videos' virality.

"If you say that Velocity is our weather prediction system – tells you which hill to stand on if you want to see the lightning strike – what KG does is it helps you understand thoroughly how that lightning is striking and then ideally it helps you bottle it so you can let it out whenever you want," Peterson told AdAge.