CorpBlawg

Corporate Blogging ROI: Hard Return vs. Soft Return

I’ve been both busy and a little bit blog-lazy this last week, so my apologies for the long silence. I hope to post more later this week as I should finally have enough time to catch up on feed-reading.

Last month Charlene Li made a very interesting proposal for a framework to measure the ROI of corporate blogging. Being neither a marketer/economist nor a corporate blogger, I can hardly add any suggestions for a precise system of measurement. However, I think that there are some basic ways of describing the different kinds of return blogging can net a business. I’ll start by looking at the aims associated with company blogs.

Functional areas of corporate blogs

First, let’s examine six different basic functions for which corporate blogs are utilized. I’ve included the main target groups for each function in brackets.

a) PR/Image (targeting: public, customers)

b) Marketing (targeting: customers, potential customers)

c) Customer Relations (targeting: customers)

d) HR/Recruiting (targeting: potential employees)

e) Intra-company/intra-industry Communication (targeting: staff, industry experts)

f) Strategy (targeting: shareholders, journalists, staff)

Note that I don’t call these different functions “categories” or “types”. The problem with that would be that no corporate blog fits neatly into a single category. Instead, virtually all of them are hybrids, serving a combination of purposes. GM’s Fastlane Blog has posts concerned with a diverse set of issues, such as customer relations, marketing/market research, corporate strategy and the company’s image. While Fastlane deals with a range of topics and has a number of different authors, Sun’s CEO blog has just one author - Jonathan Schwartz - but the array of functions is equally large. And while developer blog hubs, such as those maintained or supported by Microsoft, Oracle or SAP have hundreds of authors, they serve comparably few functions (intra-industry/intra-company communication and potentially customer relations).

I have grouped the functions outlined above according to what could be called their broader readership orientation, i.e. whether they are concerned with customers and the general public (functions a,b and c), with the company itself (d and e) or with interest groups vital to the company, such as shareholders and journalists (f).

Here’s an illustration of the function groups, their focus and orientation:

Stress and hard vs. soft return

Assuming that corporate blogs generally have the objective of somehow generating a return on investment for the companies which maintain them, it makes sense to look at the kinds of return and how they are related to different functions.
I’m going to make two basic distinctions:

hard return = more readers, more sales, greater visibility (usually quantitative)

soft return = trust, positive image, human face (usually qualitative)

Any blog can potentially yield both types of return, but the distribution between the two depends on which aspect is prioritized by the authors. Take Robert Scoble when he was still blogging for Microsoft. Scoble’s role was not really to make Microsoft more visible, nor would anyone suggest an immediate connection between his blog and the company’s sales. What Scoble changed - at least to some of his readers - was how people perceived Microsoft, in contrast to just how many. Large companies are mostly interested in influencing how they are perceived by the public or vital interest groups, thus their blogs are more focused on soft return factors (see McDonald’s, Cisco). Since soft return normally has a qualitative effect*, it is more difficult to measure than hard return. Most copywriters, marketers and smaller businesses will have hard return in mind when blogging - increasing visibility and sales via an informative or entertaining blog is the most common goal. Blog-SEO is another significant hard return factor. Because hard-return bloggers aim for growth in readership, they write to deliver, that is, they seek to provide some kind of added value to the reader, whether this value is information, entertainment, instruction etc. By contrast, soft return-oriented blogs aim to engage. They tend to focus on the discussion around an issue more than on the issue itself. The dynamic social relationship between the author and his readers is the decisive element. Soft return as a concept works somewhat analogically to what Doc Searls calls the because effect, in the sense that it highlights the interaction over the item, just as the because effect highlights the business opportunities created because of the propagation of a technology over the technology itself.

The basic decision to prioritize delivering over engaging or vice versa determines the stress of the blog. A blogger may choose to emphasize content (deliver), or the interaction with his readers (engage):

Measuring different types of return

If we assume that different function-focus combinations favor one of either types of return over the other, and therefore stress either delivery or engagement, it follows that different measurements are needed to determine the return a blog produces. The frequency and length of comments, for example, seems an appropriate measurement for how engaging a blog is, but arguably a blog can be informative without provoking a lot of feedback. Blogs written for functions such as recruitment or intra-industry/intra-company communication usually aim to both deliver and engage, but focus on very specific groups and have specific objectives in mind (recruiting qualified staff and solving technical problems).

Simply put, measurement of you blog’s ROI should be tailored to your type of blog. Taking aspects such as orientation, focus, function and stress into account makes that task much more workable than coming up with a one-size-fits-all solution.

* I would argue that frequency of comments can be counted as a quantitative effect of soft return. Most other metrics tend to apply to hard return, however.

Cornelius posted this article under Charlene Li, Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Thesis on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:56 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.