Bernaisesource

You’ve successfully launched a corporate blog.  You gained support from your clients and bosses, managed to get some traction in the blogging community and even garnered some coverage in the mainstream media.  Now what?  Is act two measuring your blog's success and determining its ROI?  

ROI – rate of return – a term most PR folks are loath to discuss.  It’s not that we don’t want to measure our success; it’s just that the measurements are often inexact and subjective.  How do you measure stories you kill?  Is a brief mention in the New York Times better than a full profile in a less widely read publication?  How do you factor in tone and placement?  Are three cameras at a local press conference better than one if that camera yields a longer story on the number one affiliate in the market?  And these questions don’t even begin to address the role of new media.

Similarly, I think measuring a blog’s impact still lacks precision and meaningful quantification.  It is difficult to gauge the real (monetary) value of fostering greater employee engagement, minimizing customer discontent, personalizing a company’s image and enhancing the understanding of a company’s products and researchers.

To their credit, vice president and principal analyst Charlene Li and Chloe Stromberg have taken on the ROI of blogging in a recent report for Forrester Research, Inc.  It’s an inexact science, but at least they are attempting to construct a methodology to gauge blogging's effectiveness. In it, The ROI of Blogging, The “Why” and “How” of External Blogging Accountability (January 2007), they discuss ways to evaluate a blog’s effectiveness.  Given the number of responses (Steve Rubel, Mario Sundar, Renee Blodgett), the authors are onto something.

Their approach factors in the benefits, costs and risks of having a blog.

Benefits:  What are the primary ways that your company will benefit from having a blog?
Costs:  How will your company pay, both in hard costs and resources, for a blog?
Risks:  How do the uncertainties change the total impact of blogging on your business?

Putting aside the study’s conclusions, what is obvious about ROI is that it helps us to focus on a blog’s value and conversely the price of not having one at all.  To be sure, there are real costs associated with blogging -- software, system administration, employee time and possible legal costs -- but blogging in my opinion is an essential component of a company’s total communications strategy.   Risks can be minimized, costs reduced, and success gauged but blogs are here to stay – even if the ROI is not as high as originally projected.

The challenge in developing an industry standard is that there are as many reasons for blogs as there are blogs themselves.  As Charlene Li wrote on her blog:  "As you can see, this process and framework is not cut and dry, black and white. Rather, it’s highly subjective, requires tremendous judgment, and is open to interpretation. But it is a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity."  Ultimately, blogging's value will correspond to the corporate culture in which it functions.   Who writes them, what they write and why they write them vary from company to company.

Granted there is a lot of hype associated with blogs which can obscure the true measure of their worth.  But putting aside the hype, corporate blogging still defies easy measurement precisely because we are in the early stages of its life cycle.   

That we are trying to quantify a blog’s value demonstrates the growing legitimacy of blogging as, dare I say, a marketing tool.    Bosses and clients are going to want a way to gauge success.  In their report, the authors offer up some benefits to consider (see chart below) including blog traffic, press mentions, search engine positioning, savings on consumer insight.  These benefits are useful, but they only tell part of the story. 

                                                                Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

In the end, I think we need to be cautious in applying existing marketing measurements to what is clearly a new form of communications.  Trying to fit blogging within traditional PR or marketing tools with corresponding measurements, may not only kill its spontaneity, it may result in a backlash from the blogging community.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Blogging ROI; Blogs; Corporate Communications; Charlene Li; Forrester Research;

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