Patent ID: 8656298

Claim:
A method of generating a graphical display showing interactions with a piece of content accessible via a number of unrelated websites, comprising: storing a piece of content within a database and providing access to the piece of content via a website hosted by a server associated with the database, where the database is used to create an online marketing platform for an online social network and the piece of content is user-generated content solicited via the online marketing platform; receiving a request from a user to propagate the piece of content to a first 3 rd party website hosted via a first 3 rd party server; obtaining user account information; accessing the first 3 rd party server using the user account information; providing propagation player code to the first 3 rd party server, where the propagation player code includes information enabling a browser application to access the piece of content via the server associated with the database and where the propagation player code can be reused on a second 3 rd party website hosted on a second 3 rd party server; receiving requests from browser applications, where the requests are associated with user interactions with the piece of content; identifying requests associated with a user interaction via the propagation player included in the first 3 rd party website; identifying the first 3 rd party website via the requests associated with the user interaction via the propagation player; updating database records tracking user interactions with the piece of content via different websites in response to the received requests; generating a display of the websites to which the content has been propagated, where the display includes at least one 3 rd party website and information concerning engagements with the content, where the display is a graph, the vertices of the graph represent websites and the edges of the graph represent propagation of the piece of content, and at least one vertex is annotated with at least one annotation indicative of the number of a particular type of interaction that occurred with a piece of content via the website corresponding to the vertex.