How do you know if an organization’s blog has been successful? Or, to put it a better way, how do organizations set measures for success before they start blogging?
The number of posts, amount of comments and site traffic are all measurable things, but I don’t feel they get at business value. I’m interested in the ability to reach an intended audience, engagement with the posted material, and knowledge transfer from bloggers to their audience. How do these things get measured in the world of blogs?
My organization just started blogging, and we had a number of reasons for doing it:
- first mover advantage
- becoming a role model for other divisions in our organization
- bringing potential bloggers under the organizational umbrella before they took the initiative to blog on their own
- popularity of the medium
- ability to reach new audiences
- ability to reach old audiences in a new way
It was enough to get the ball rolling, but I will need to show that blogs are a valuable investment over the long term. My thought was to try to draw a relationship between the knowledge in blog posts and organizational goals, though I think that’s going to be hard. I also thought I might look at the difference in social networks before and after blogging. Anyone else struggling with this?
There are several ways to measure the effectivness of blog reach, influence, impact or social networking.
Some are purely numerical and can efficacy can be gauged over time (number of subscriptions, number of comments and / or actively engaged participants, number of inbound link references).
Measuring influence and growth of your social network is less precise, but still quite do-able. I’m drawing parallels to the active social networks of knitters around the globe. There are a number of people who have become famous authors or well-known designers and it all started with one blogger, writing for no one in particular.
We talk about them like we’ve known them forever. Blogging makes them both well-known and accessible.
The same can be said of other communities of interest. Measure the influence of a economist by the number of downloads of his / her research; by the increase in references to the blog from peers, etc.
Yes, the traffic, inbound links, etc. numbers are easy to measure, but translating those numbers into business value is the tricky bit. Did knowledge transfer occur? Did that knowledge transfer benefit the organization? And how does an individual’s recognition in the blogging world translate into benefit for an organization? Can that be quanitifed somehow? I know there are benefits to blogging, but I need to put it in more concrete terms.