More on the ROI of corporate blogging from Charlene

I know my posts have been both pretty academic and infrequent recently, so here’s something juicy for a change. It’s a follow-up on the earlier work done by Charlene Li and others at Forrester regarding corporate blogging ROI.

Here are two great quotes from Charlene’s post:

Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.

Anything resembling something like a standard ROI would have made me very skeptical. I’m not a business analyst, but I am getting a better and better impression of how corporate blogs work from analyzing them textually, and as Charlene observes, these goals are simply too diverse for a single metric. One things I’m curious about and that is part of my research is whether these goals in different kinds of corporate blogs – product blogs, PR blogs, blogs for knowledge-sharing – have an impact on style. Another (though very tricky) question is closely related to ROI: is there a correlation between style and blog success? A lot of people argue that a certain kind of style is “good blogging”, but is it possible to verify that empirically?
Q: But this is heresy – you can’t put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You’ve just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.

I think it’s important that she acknowledges both the need for metrics and the lack of precision of such measures when it comes to blogging. In other words: we should measure this stuff, otherwise we’re just following an unsubstantial intuition (“blogging is great”). But at the same time we should be aware that these measures are pretty rough approximations and that the metrics we use need to be context-sensitive. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.