Thursday, November 08, 2007

At Blog World Expo...

Greetings from Blog World Expo in Las Vegas!

Interesting assortment of people, speakers, and vendors. This morning I attended a really good session on corporate blogging led by Debbie Weil, definitely a voice of authority on the topic. The panel included bloggers from Kodak, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and HP.

Here’s a question that I asked that I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer to: how do you measure the success or the results of a corporate blog? Is anybody in a large corporation turning to their blog team and asking that? My guess is that before long, having a blog will be an obvious necessity, and no one will be looking for specific ROI measurements... but still, there will likely be some measures that people pay attention to (traffic, links back, etc.).

How do you measure the success of your blog?

2 comments:

Toby said...

Hi John -
I had a great time at Blog World. Sorry I missed Debbie's panel.

To add to the conversation about measuring success .. it should tie back to specific goals/objectives; which in the social media world may be different than those of traditional media/marketing. Not quite sure what you mean by blog team. However, my sense is that ROI will not go away but that organizations will come to a better way to prove success of social media than thru uniques or downloads. In the end it's all about making the cash register ring and if social media can provide a way to build better relationships, lift SEO rankings, reinforce positioning or provide more "soft" opportunities (articles, speeches)then resources will be allocated.

Des said...

I'm glad Toby has weighed in.

A response to this question recently by I forget whom was that you need to measure the success of your blog by the objectives you set in the first place: how you measure that achievement or otherwise is another question, but one method will not fit all objectives.

And while perhaps not right on target for your question, I would recommend to anyone interested in these questions that they watch Avinash Kaushik's session at BWE - happily recorded on video by Simon Chen at eightblack.com http://tinyurl.com/2tu35x - one of the highlights for me of the whole event.