Nov 1st, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging | 1 Comment
A while back, I posted about commercial speech and blogging - a hot topic in terms of what risks are associated with the institutional use of blogs. Complementing the risk question is the discussion of what benefits blogging has in a corporate context, apart from “me too” pressure associated with the social media craze. The return issue is also brought up in this Computer World article, in which author Heather Havenstein describes the efforts of network performance support provider NetQoS (blog).
At such companies, executives or full-time in-house bloggers like Boyko are writing posts. Although the goal is still to raise the profile of a company, the new-style blogs often tackle unconventional topics that may not have an obvious effect on businesses’ bottom lines.
The ROI question (see discussion here and here) remains impossibly fuzzy, at least from where I’m standing*. Will we ever have a way of measuring hard return on something like trust, presence or influence? I doubt it. From my vantage point, however, blogs have fairly little impact on anything that’s short-term, because they rely on network effects to become influential. They also tend to be identified very strongly with the individual writer, usually more than with the theme or topic of the blog (though this varies). That’s why it’s so hard to launch a good marketing blog: they tend to have little topical breadth** because the focus is usually on the product and the author is either invisible or has no room for personal expression***.
* When talking about public-facing blogs. The ROI of internal knowledge blogs could be slightly easier to measure.
** Of course, this very much depends on your product.
*** In a blog such as this one.
Oct 28th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Social Web | 6 Comments
Originally this was meant to be a response to my friend and personal muse Katherine Ferranti, but as it sometimes happens a brief email grew into something rather lengthy and bloggish and since I’ve neglected CorpBlawg far too long anyway, I decided to post here instead. Katherine pointed me to this piece on GigaOM about social productivity that is both a relatively low-key sales pitch for Jive Software’s Clearspace collaboration package and a general discussion of social software in organizational environments. The basis is an entry in Jive’s own blog that outlines what the company’s Sam Lawrence calls social productivity. Here’s a snippet:
Social Productivity is different […] it’s about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn’t just true “behind the firewall” within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.
First of all - while I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, it is objectively impossible to judge how relevant its content is and your judgment very much depends on several factors (What kind of information are you looking for? What article are you looking at? Are you looking for expert knowledge or just a brief introduction into a topic?). But let’s forget about Wikipedia for a moment and focus on social productivity.
With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company.
Wait - people outside of my company? What motive would they have to support a company project, assuming they aren’t getting paid for it? People outside my company don’t have any incentive to chime in - at least I have significant trouble imagining why they should want to.
The trouble is that the goal of a company isn’t to benefit a social network or community, it is to make money. This places severe limitations on social productivity, unless you assume that people enjoy working for free. With slight cynicism, one could contend that this is what the concept implies - let’s not be so uptight about who is paying whom, after all we’re all collaborating on everything anyway, right? Work is such a old-fashioned concept. Let’s just call everything collaboration and get people to give away their productivity for free and tada - there you have your ROI of social software.
I’m not implying that this is what Lawrence means. Clearspace is meant to make communication across departments and hierarchies easier and anyone who has ever worked for a large organization knows what a serious issue that is. But I think it’s important to note where the structure and purpose of a corporate entity are incompatible (or at least in conflict) with those of a social network and why the metaphor “let’s be just like Wikipedia” just doesn’t work.
Wikipedia exists for the sole purpose of creating a resource from which everyone will benefit in the same way, with the added perk that those who contribute are rewarded with social prestige among their peers. Some contributors are in it simply to improve the resource, others are in it because they feel rewarded by playing a role in the Wikipedia community. But in contrast to a company, people always work for some kind of personal gain, be it prestige or a feeling of achievement and they know that everyone else befits in the same way. Of course the employees of a company also work for personal gain, but for a monetary one and one that is built on the premise that not everyone benefits in the same way. In return for a salary and the perspective that I might increase some day they work for the good of the company - which should eventually translate into personal gain (more money). They accept hierarchical structures and persistent pressure to turn corporate goals into reality because there is a payoff. That isn’t a bad thing - it’s how organizations with paid employees work. And undoubtedly a large percentage of people loves their job and aren’t in it purely for the money. But it’s not the same way Wikipedia works, for obvious reasons.
Only after resolving the conflict between personal and organizational goals can the introduction of social soctware into the corporate world be successful. As long as employees feel that they have more to gain by competing than by collaborating they will do just that. Sharing makes sense when the playing field is perfectly level. Which it hardly is, out there in the corporate world.
Jun 28th, 2007 | Adobe, Corporate Blogging, IBM, Knowledge Blogging, Microsoft, ROI of Blogging, SAP, Style | No Comments
And now, after an exciting trip into the world of science blogging, we return to our regular scheduled program.
I’ve been meaning to write something on knowledge blogs (that I’ve previously referred to as expert or industry blogs) as one specific subgenre of corporate blogs for quite a while now. Several recent conversations on the subject have further increased my interest and yesterday I realized that I have been sitting on an exclusive interview with a knowledge blog expert for several months - something that I should absolutely share.
Knowledge blogs are written with the intention of providing insight and information into a topic a company blogger has substantial expertise in. They can be public-facing or have restricted access, but in both cases the target audience is usually a specialized one. A public-facing knowledge blog (or a limited-access blog that allows providing access to affiliates) can be written for customers who seek information and instruction, partners who collaborate in a project, experts at academic institutions, consultants etc. I imagine a typical intranet blog is likely to be more bidirectional than a public-facing one, meaning it is likely to be used for internal communication, partly replacing email, whereas a blog that is accessible to everyone (like the one I’ll present in a moment) is normally used for instruction, making the exchange between blogger and reader more unidirectional.
Software companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, SAP and Adobe use public-facing knowledge blogs on a large scale for the purposes mentioned above. The very technical nature of their products makes customer service a largely informational challenge and many of the customers are not end-users, but second-level developers who use specialized development tools to in turn create end-user products.
One extremely successful example of a knowledge blog from the IT sector (and obviously there are many) is If broken it is, fix it you should which is maintained by Tess Ferrandez. Tess is “an escalation engineer in PSS (product support services) at Microsoft, mostly dealing with ASP.NET but anything .NETish works” (from her about page). The application of terms such as “knowledge” and “expert” becomes natural when you take a look at what Tess writes about. To someone not educated in debugging ASP.net applications virtually every sentence in the blog will be completely opaque, but to Tess’ sizable international audience her troubleshooting tips are invaluable.
Independently of whether or not you have a grasp of the subject matter, it becomes apparent quite quickly when reading If broke it is that Tess has a knack for explaining highly complex problems in an accessible way. Another aspect that intrigues me is that she often frames problems in a tone that resembles storytelling - there’s an arc of suspense, from the initial situation (something doesn’t work) to the discovery of the root of the problem and its resolution. Notably this kind of framing is the direct inversion of how issues are presented in a classical knowledge base. Contextual data (e.g. what the engineer thinks or experiences while he is working on the problem) is omitted. There is no sequence of events; instead facts are presented outside of time. For example, compare this entry from Tess’ blog with the knowledge base article it cites. The knowledge base article has no identifiable author (there is no “I”, like there is in the blog) and the sequence of topics does not map to a sequence of events. By contrast, Tess’ debugging examples are narratives; they don’t contain an objectively-detached analysis of a piece of software but the subjective-experiential description of how she approaches, assesses and fixes a problem. We learn by example.
There’s a lot I could write about why I think this is a very promising approach and what it has to do with how we process information, but I’ll save that for another post.
Here are Tess’ answers to 10 questions I asked her via email. I plan to conduct more of these interviews and use them for my thesis, to accurately describe the practitioner’s perspective on corporate blogging.
Once more, I would like to thank Tess for allowing me to interview her.
E-mail interview with Tess Ferrandez
Cornelius: What (if anything) do you enjoy most about blogging?
Tess: I enjoy the instant feedback from people reading the blog, and I enjoy teaching and debugging so blogging is the perfect venue for me to teach debugging and make sure that people don’t have to run into issues that they could easily avoid if they knew about them.
Cornelius: Did someone else encourage you to blog or did you start out of you own accord?
Tess: I started on my own accord, we keep telling customers the same thing over and over in emails and I figured that a) I could avoid having to reinvent the wheel all the time b) other people that don’t call support could benefit from this knowledge and c) if it is documented somewhere people will trust it more since it is something that is already known and not something that was made up to fit the evidence from the dumps.
Cornelius: Do you publish in certain intervals or create a schedule for publication?
Tess: I don’t have a schedule, I blog when I have something that I think is interesting to write about and when I have time to blog. My blog posts are pretty sporadic, one blog post one month and 5 the next.
Cornelius: What prompts you to write a piece?
Tess: When I have had a case that was either extremely interesting or when I find that I see the same issue over and over.
Cornelius: How would you describe your goals when writing a piece?
Tess: My goals are that the posts should be interesting to as many people as possible, so I mostly blog about issues that will affect a lot of different developers. My goals are also that it should be easy to digest while at the same time contain enough detail to be useful, so I structure the content in a way that you can either read it all if you are interested in the details or just read the bottom line if you are just interested in the solution. The primary purpose of the posts are to show common issues and their solutions but also provide debugging tips so that people can resolve similar issues on their own.
Cornelius: Has your employer made any suggestions to you regarding topics that should be avoided (e.g. for legal reasons) or made any suggestions to you on what to blog about?
Tess: Not really, however I avoid four things:
1. Naming customers,
2. Naming 3rd party components
3. Providing information about items that are either confidential or that I know are prone to change to avoid confusion.
These are pretty much the same rules that apply to any communication we have with customers, they expect to be able to trust us so we should not leave out any information about them, and in terms of 3rd party products, if I haven’t tested them myself in a formal way I can’t really expect to be able to express a formal opinion about them.
Cornelius: What kind of reactions do you get from colleagues, clients etc. regarding your blog?
Tess: Only positive, a lot of my colleagues have started blogging after they saw my blog and how many readers I got, i.e. how many people benefit from it, and I have seen a trend of these blogs being very successful.
My blog gets about 100 000 web hits and 400 000 RSS hits a month, and if something I write even helps 1 % of those that would be a good return on investment.
I almost get emails on a weekly bases with positive comments from readers and customers which is extremely encouraging and prompts me to write even more.
Cornelius: Do you put a lot of care into formal aspects like spelling, grammar etc?
Tess: I try not to misspell too many wordsJ but I don’t fret about it too much, after all my blog is not about linguisticsJ
Cornelius: Oh, linguists get these things wrong all the time, don’t worry 
The reason I ask is mainly because some people (Robert Scoble, for example) say that to them blogs are conversations, so that in contrast to expository writing where you check, revise and edit a lot it’s mostly about speed and efficiency.
Your posts are very informational and complex and thus you probably spend more time planning and editing than someone like Scoble, who posts 4 or 5 very short pieces per day.
Cornelius: Has your approach to blogging changed over time?
Tess: Yes and no, after writing a lot of posts I can tell which posts are going to get a lot of hits and which ones aren’t, and also what people tend to search for when they get to my blog, so I try to keep titles etc. relevant so that more people can reach it and see immediately if it is relevant or not.
Cornelius: Do personal experiences play a role in your blogging?
Tess: I am not sure how to answer that. My blog is about personal experiences with issues that I have worked but I am not sure if that is what you are looking for.
Cornelius: My bad, the questions wasn’t phrased very well. What I meant was: do you ever refer to things that aren’t strictly work-related, things that you would describe as personal? Obviously you don’t post pictures of your cat (though some tech people do) but do you ever use anecdotes or stories in your posts?
Tess: I would say no, I don’t post much about personal experiences, in fact I think the only personal post I have made so far was when I got blog tagged.
The main reason is because I don’t think that is what people reading my blog are interested in, but having said that I would use personal references if it adds to the story, i.e. if something in my personal life could act as an analogy to explain something complex.
I do add a lot of personal comments though to make the posts more readable because I don’t want them to be stale and dry, but on the other hand I would never tell stories about my family and friends in the blog because I want to keep it informational rather than “here is what i did today”.
Apr 10th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Fake Blogs, Gourmet Station, PR, ROI of Blogging, Robert Scoble | 1 Comment
That’s the title of a great 1997 album by Blonde Redhead and as it happens, it is also today’s topic - just in a way not related to alternative rock, but to (corporate) blogging.
Here’s the thing: it never ceases to intrigue me how often I come across blogging-related advice. There’s no shortage of suggestions, guidelines and even rules out there - rules that are often considered absolute and inviolable by those who postulate them. Often suggestions from perceived authorities such as Robert Scoble and Debbie Weil on how to blog are interpreted as dogma; for example, the maxims that blogs are personal, that you must be transparent and so forth have all become pervasive*. How often have you read that a blog is a conversation, or that misleading readers about the identity or motives of the blogger is immoral?
I don’t want to challenge any of these ideas, but I do want to make a distinction between the different shades of meaning of the words blog, blogging and blogger, because it is hard to talk about something when you lack a consistent definition. I also want to question the validity of the judgment that certain blogs are “fake”, or at least ask whether that’s really a bad thing.
Blogging is understood alternately understood as
a) the use of a publishing technology
b) the style in which blogs are often written
c) the type of social interaction between the blogger and his readers
and often - but not always - it is the combination of all three of these things. Note that they build upon each other: a bloggy style makes limited sense when you’re writing a letter (using another publishing technology), because even though the two types of text share several common traits they also differ significantly in other regards.
Say you’re a Java developer who likes to write about coding, snowboarding in the Rockies and Frank Miller comic books. You’ve set up an installation of Wordpress on your own webserver and publish your first entry. It could start like this:
Hey everyone! So, guess what, I’ve decided to start a blog too. I’ll post here from time to time to talk about whatever catches my interest […]
Even with just a handful of words, it can be clearly established that this kind of writing appeared in a blog and not, say, a newspaper, a personal diary, or a speech, even though it contains elements that are also common in these genres (of course it has the word “blog” in it, but even without that keyword I think a classification is possible). Now imagine that you’re a loyal reader of this blog and one day you find out that your snowboarding hacker friend is actually an invention - a fictional character developed by the department of systematic deception (DoSD) of a global PR firm (let’s call it Noble PR).
How would you react to this piece of information?
I think one gets a good idea of how people feel about these things when looking at blogs like this one and reactions such as these (read the first few comments). Blogs like Gourmet Station’s have been widely criticized for “violating the rules” and “being fake”. Where do these sentiments come from? They are the result of a holistic interpretation of blogs as a specific combination of a publishing technology, a style of writing and a kind of social interaction (a + b + c; see above). In other words: if you run a blogging software, write from a first-person viewpoint and directly address your readers, it is assumed that you are a real person, because only real human beings can engage in such an interaction (meaning a + b implicates c).
There are good reasons why you might want to use a blog as a publishing tool without writing in a bloggy style or allowing comments from your readers. Tools such as Wordpress and Movable Type are used for everything from publishing poetry to managing entire websites and their versatility makes “non-traditional” usages plausible. But the Catch 22 appears to be style: if a writer makes frequent use of the first-person pronoun, vocatives, interjections and other stylistic elements that are traditionally frequent in spoken language in what looks like a blog in terms of presentation, it must be assumed that he is communicating with me, because that is how a typical blog works.
Social interactions of even the simplest type represent an investment for the participants. I react to you in a certain way because I have assumptions both about you and about your assumptions about me. If my assumptions turn out to be unfounded, the result is a loss of face. Nobody wants to deal with someone who isn’t honest about their identity.
The special thing about blogs is that the technological frame they live in makes it especially plausible to assume these things. Nobody finds the conversational style described above terribly confusing or irritating in a novel, despite the fact that we usually know the difference between the voice of the author and the voice of his fictional characters**. But the difference is that I can’t interact with the author when reading a novel and thus there is very little likelihood that I’ll mistake what is going on for a real instance of communication that somehow involves me.
So where does that leave us? And why is the title of this post “fake can be just as good”?
Despite the outrage two years ago, the fictional T. Alexander still blogs for Gourmet Station and the blog has a PageRank of 5 out of 10 (this site has a mere 3). It shows up in fourth place if you google for “gourmet blog” and, according to Technorati, almost 400 links poin there. Finally the Northeastern University/Backbone Media Study lists it as an example for successful corporate blogging.
Here’s a (rather long) excerpt that provides an excellent picture of Gourmet Station’s approach to the blog (taken from the study):
Donna described how everything on the blog has to be consistent with the brand. She moderates the comments and makes sure those comments are consistent with the brand. No profanity or unrelated comments are allowed on the blog. Donna explained that “everything has got to be very buttoned up, we have a very buttoned up brand, and we have a very upscale brand, very upscale, well educated customers. So anything that goes out there has to be consistent with that.” The blog also allows the company to discuss their content in a laid back tone. That content has produced higher rankings on search engines and helped to increase traffic to the blog by 10%.
Donna believes it to be important that the people who write on the blog are knowledgeable about food and wine. The blog’s readers are looking for ideas around food, drink, and entertainment.
The blog has helped Donna’s company add content to their website on the topics and products the company is focused on providing. Also, the blog has given Donna the ability to place content that they otherwise would not have been able to put on their website. Donna said it was important that a company covers all of the topics they wish to cover in their blog posts, and to categorize those topics by keyword.
The Gourmet Station blog has achieved a number two ranking on the keyword “gourmet dinners” in Yahoo! The blog has played a big part in helping the company to achieve that ranking. According to Donna, the blog has also helped establish the company’s brand and provide more sales conversions by making a “passionate connection” with readers.
The topic that generates the most conversation and interaction from readers on the blog is romance. Donna said that made sense, as the search volumes for romance and dinner have a great connection.
Donna selects the content of the posts by season. Donna said the blog has 14 categories, and the company always has a recent post in each of the categories.
Donna recommends a company have a strategy before starting to blogging. Her company has two strategies: to fill their categories with content and to increase they’re (sic) ranking on search engines.
The bottom line appears to be: Gourmet Station designed a blog to increase search engine visibility and to publish material that did not fit into the context of a traditional corporate site. Perhaps they felt that this material was too context-dependent (recipes for seasonal gourmet foods, etc), or that a less formal style of writing was needed, but only in a certain limited area and not for the entire site. Whatever their motivation - there is hardly a rational reason to argue against their success. Whether “fake” or “real” (note the quotes), it appears that different strategies can realize different goals for different people.
I’m pretty sure that examples such as the Gourmet Station blog will remain marginal, though. It’s not really because of the outrage “fake” company blogs generate (is there such a thing as bad PR?), but because it seems somewhat contrived and unnecessary to come up with a fictional character to write your blog when you might just as well have a real person do it. It’s not too hard to stick with The Message even when you’re blogging under your own name - numerous product blogs out there prove that. How you measure success is an entirely other question. In that context, note Gourmet Station’s specific goals of increasing visibility and publishing “unconventional” content.
So there it is. You can blog, or you can publish via a blog. Or you can do the latter and hope that people will believe it’s really the former. Not much shame in that, I think.
* The single most important document in this context is probably Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto, which has seems to have influenced most subsequently formulated blogging guidelines.
** Of course this is systematically exploited in literature, for example in epistolary novels. Playing with the status of a piece of writing as ambiguously real or fictional was also a hallmark of Postmodernism.
(Edit) Here are a few more interesting links I initially forgot to include: one, two, three.
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.
Aug 28th, 2006 | Boeing, Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, GM, ROI of Blogging, Randy Baseler | 4 Comments
I’ve just finished listening to an interview with Debbie Weil posted on podtech.net. Needless to say, she talks about her book and provides her views on corporate blogging as part of a marketing strategy, but as has been noted elsewhere, the piece remains rather general and somewhat blurry around the edges. However, I wasn’t interested solely in the topic itself, but also in how interviewer Jennifer Jones and Weil characterize blogging and what their perspective is.
Here’s a summary, with a few comments sprinkled in here and there.
Jones names three categories of corporate blogs (from Weil’s book, I assume) which can be integrated into a corporate marketing strategy:
- thought leadership blogs
- community building blogs
- CRM blogs
She then asks Weil to name examples for each categories and interjects a questions about the ROI of blogging at one point. Weil begins by describing blogs from a technical point of view, as “a kind of web site”. The characterization is interesting because it bypasses the usually cited aspects of content and style, i.e. “like a personal diary” or “written in an informal tone“. Weil’s definition is much more accurate: blogs are similar to personal diaries (or ship’s logs, for that matter) only in terms of post structure. The other reason for the generalization that blogs are diaries stems from the fact that most people seem to use them in that fashion. But whereas e.g. the novel is a form of text (or genre), the blog remains as of yet a publishing technology. Of course it’s possible - probable even - that the format eventually becomes a genre, as people establish a generally accepted notion of what a blog should “sound like” and these concepts become conventions, but I think it’s safe to assume that this hasn’t happened yet.
Weil goes on to name search engine attraction as a prime reason to maintain a blog. I feel that this partly undermines what she later says about “thought leadership” etc, because it implies that exposure is more important than what is actually blogged. Then again, SEO remains the sole advantage of corporate blogging that is measurable, so citing visibility as a relevant incentive makes sense. Either that, or I interpret “thought leadership” a bit too literally.
She goes on to describe a (good) thought leadership blog as telling “the back story”, “what the executive is thinking”, and that it should be “real”, and provides Jonathan Schwartz’ blog as an example. Her counter-example is Randy Baseler of Boeing, whose style she refers to somewhat “bland”.
Interesting tidbit: while I’m not quite ready to tout it as evidence, my metrics on both blogs correlate with her observation in an interesting way. Schwartz uses personal and possessive plural pronouns (”we”, “our”) more frequently than Baseler. His style could be characterized as somewhat more involved than Baseler’s, which could in turn have an effect on reception. Note that I’m careful about drawing any conclusions. Even if I had more data (which I don’t, at least not yet), how interesting one writes is not quantifiable through language analysis. Interestingly enough though, Weil goes into a similar direction when she calls material written by PR people “vetted”, “reviewed”, and “corporate speak”, which is in opposition to the maxim of “telling the back story”.
After discussing community building blogs (which are similar to what I’ve labelled industry blogs), Jones brings up the question of return on investment for blogging. Weil can, of course, provide no answer to the question of “whether blogs work”, but suggests that the influence exerted by blogs is beneficial and thus profitable. This is at least somewhat problematic. A catchy phrase such as “return on influence” actually underlines the problem of not knowing anything about the effects of blogging. When talking about “return on investment”, the investment part of the equation is known, it’s the return that we’re interested in. “Return on influence”, by contrast, is an equation with two unknown variables - we neither know the return, nor whether there is influence, nor how closely the two are related. I wouldn’t deny that blogs may have an influence on consumer perception, only that this relationship can be easily characterized as “return on anything” (ROA).
The third type of blog that Weil discusses is the CRM blog. She cites Google as an example and asserts that the company blog is used partly to “side-step the press”, i.e. to provide customers with an account that provides “the back story” in addition to the “official story” of the press release. “What goes on behind the doors” is what is really interesting to people, etc. Does this suggest that the #1 PR strategy associated with blogging is to proclaim that PR is dead - to then cheerfully resurrect it in a new outfit, speaking a new lingo? Are blogs marketing tools which should not be used by marketers, because that would invalidate their claim of authenticity? Death to PR and marketing, long live PR and marketing 2.0?
Finally, she gives GM’s product blog as an example for how a blog’s goal can be “misunderstood on the part of the customer”. The Fastlane blog is conceived as a means of showcasing GM’s products to potential customers and to the public at large, not to provide customer assistance or publicly debate corporate strategy. Of course, one could object that the “misunderstanding” lies elsewhere, namely in the company’s assumption that it is possible to tout a blog as proof of a commitment to openness and community and then “close the door” when the response is deemed inappropriate or off-topic. The schema of blogging invites comments and feedback - readers are unlikely to care that your company’s blog is devised purely to advertise products if they’ve learned elsewhere that blogs are all about interactivity and people connecting. If enough energy is devoted to making a speaker appear authentic, his authentic speech will produce authentic responses.
