I’ve been reading the trades again – but this is London and that’s what a commute is made for - selecting to avoid iPod ear pollution, I go for the magazines to pass the time, pressed up or squashed in with random strangers on London’s buses and trains.

Without ROI on marketing spend, the board room ‘voice’ booms back, ‘Why bother?’ or ‘You want more - prove why?’ so here is some ammunition to fight back with.

How do you measure ROI for Corporate Blogs?

The CIM drums into us that you have to set targets so you can measure against them. Common sense. Think hard and work out why you want a corporate blog. Because everyone else has or wants one shouldn’t be the answer you come up with.

Benchmarking blogs can entail comparing statistics month on month. Looking at annualised results will provide trends.

We recommend a mix of numerical and subjective targets. Here’s a starting point for setting targets:

Conversation measurements
• Number of contributors - If your policy is that it’s the CEO’s spokes-vehicle then the answer will always be one. But if it’s meant to be a company-wide view, the more the merrier.
• Number of comments - The more positive or contributory comment, the merrier. The more negative comments, the worse.
• Quality of contribution - Subjective measure.
• Look for frequency appropriate to the conversation.
• Share of voice – who else is covering this topic? Search on technorati.com or blogpulse.com or http://www.google.com/blogsearch. Idea is you generate enough ‘noise’ to crowd out other voices.
• Number of comments you leave on other sites.

Blog tech specific measurements
• Number of trackbacks - Ease of measurement depends on your blog platform. WordPress blogs automatically track back links. With Typepad blogs you have to find the address and ping them.
• Number of links – Thank you to Adrian Melrose, our Chairman, has just shown me how to measure number of links; open a google window www.google.co.uk ; type in the search box ‘link:blog.*.*’; e.g.: link:blog.givingmatters.co.uk and the results show they have 71 links (at the moment; 14 Feb 10.30 am).

Website analytics
• Number of unique visitors – Good for comparative stats.
• Number of new visitors and number of repeat visitors – let’s hope they are both growing.
• Amount of time spent on site, hopefully not whilst making coffee etc but in front of the screen reading words of wisdom.
• Most viewed/Least viewed pages – Might help identify popularity of contributors.
• Click path – what pages were visited and in what order.

Looking for constant growth in numerical month-on-month results isn’t necessarily the most appropriate method of measurement for blogs. With blogs, you can expect peaks and troughs, seasonal and topical. It all depends on the conversation you are having with your audience – even who they are!

Adding in another opinion, I return to my reading this morning when I read Neil Morgan’s comment in Revolution February 07 (pg 25). He looks at how web 2.0 investment, of which blogging is a feature, is helping business. He suggests addressing these points:
• Working out targets – what you want to achieve from your blog?
• How much real influence does it have?
• Which contributor makes people stay longer?
• Where do users go afterwards? E.g. to the home page of the corporate site or off-site?
• What impact does the content have on the business?

Micheal Specht in Australia sumarises Forrester Research’s recent report on Corporate blog ROI in these four headings (from their promotional material):
• Increased brand visibility
• Savings on customer insight
• Reduced impact of negative user generated content (UGC)
• Increases sales efficiency

If you’d like to read a basic introduction to what’s a blog, download our quick facts page here.

Do you want to add any measurement criteria for measuring corporate blogs?

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