Jan 26th, 2007 | Charlene Li, Corporate Blogging, Definitions, ROI of Blogging | No Comments
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.
Nov 1st, 2006 | Charlene Li, Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Thesis | 4 Comments
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.
Oct 3rd, 2006 | Charlene Li, Corporate Blogging, Cox Communications, Verizon | No Comments
Charlene Li reports that the U.S. telco company yesterday launched a blog on technology and telecommunications policy. It should be interesting to see how they fare - who knows, perhaps they’ll get into a scuffle with the folks over at Cox. One thing going for Verizon is that I can tell who actually writes their blog, which is rather unclear with DST. As I’ve ranted before, authorship matters.
Edit: Apparently they’re also planning to launch a customer services blog by the end of this year. Sounds ambitious.
