Sort of a rhetorical question, but this comes down to answering the age-old question asked by senior management everywhere: what are the key performance indicators that should be applied to a corporate blog to determine its success, failure, or general indifference from the audience?
I took a crack. There is the obvious “gross tonnage” statistics of visits to the blog itself, then there are RSS hits — filtering out the crawlers of course — and then there is the rankings — Technorati, etc. …
What else should and could be enumerated? Number of post comments? In-bound links? Bloglines subscriptions? Happy comments vs. angry comments? Google juice?
I need to dig more into blog metrics/analytics. It’s one thing to monitor external blog activity around a brand, but another to measure activity on one’s own blog. And again, I mean more than the old “hit” crap.
I did find some qualitative measures by Jeremiah Owyang from last November and I am too lazy to go dig out my copy of Naked Conversations to see what Scoble and Israel recommend — gauging from the b—h slapping they got from Amazon’s CTO earlier this spring, I don’t think they had an answer at the tip of their tongues either.