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.
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Sort of depends on the purpose of the blog…but if its a corporate blog, I would think the goals would be:
building a stronger relationship with customers
creating a feedback loop between customers and corporation
creating more awareness and consideration for products
To do all of that I’d think the metrics would be:
Ranking (technorati, etc) – for the awareness/consideration (goal to be first in industry)
# of Subscribers (with goals to increase x%) – builds the relationships, shows increased level of interest
# of comments – feedback mechanism, creates transparency & goodwill, also shows some level of interest…I am thinking regards of postive or negative is irrelevant, as its the communication aspect that is the important part
Funny thing is I was going to blog about this topic the other day with a lot of the same questions. I’m not sure anyone really has harnessed analytics in the blog space other than the tonnage piece. Obviously, it would be great if you had surveys to ask customers, “Hey, because of this blog, does your attitude towards our company improve?” or “Because of this blog, do you now trust us with your next purchase?” Of course, questions like that are so un-blogosphere (blogistan), and would get you laughed at.