Setting Goals and Measuring Success
The metrics presentation is given by Sally Falkow & Mary Hodder
Everyone thinks they should have a blog now because they're afraid they're missing the boat. What's important, though, is to first look inside your company to determine whether you should blog at all. Primary question is whether the company is ready to be open and authentic with customers. After that, the question is, what does the company want to accomplish? It's not simply about joining the conversation. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. If the company is ready to be open
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PrintThe metrics presentation is given by Sally Falkow & Mary Hodder
Everyone thinks they should have a blog now because they're afraid they're missing the boat. What's important, though, is to first look inside your company to determine whether you should blog at all. Primary question is whether the company is ready to be open and authentic with customers. After that, the question is, what does the company want to accomplish? It's not simply about joining the conversation. If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. If the company is ready to be open and authentic, it then needs to sit down and determine goals and desired outcome. Without that you'll have no idea if you're successful. Very important to take a look at your audience, because to a degree, your blog will depend on your audience. What keeps people coming back is getting content they can't find anywhere else. People who create blogs tend to be opinion leaders. One avenue to the blog world if your company isn't ready to get into blogging itself is to reach out to bloggers that are in your industry and begin talking to them. That will give you a presence without some of the risks inherent in blogging. Even if you do start to blog, it's still important to reach out to the thought leaders so that you reap the benefits of traffic that they can send your way.
More than 2/3 of all purchases made online or offline are researched first online. Beyond that, your partners and competitors are doing research online. Engaging with the blog community will also increase the company's search visibility and brand awareness. A company's presence on the search engines does affect its perception in the world of both customers and media. Being high up in the search engines is a way to combat the huge marketing budgets of major corporations. The cost of setting up a blog is very small as compared to the cost of traditional marketing. It's important to target specific keyword terms and blog on those topics using those keywords. Targeting posts in this manner also generates residual search benefits and keywords. Use the log files from the servers to measure success based on keyword blogging.
Some of the residual benefits from blogging can be in relation to the media. 98% of journalists, when they start to research a story, start online. It's important to integrate RSS feeds as well since the feeds are picked up by search engines, thought leaders and journalists. It's also possible to set up a separate blog targeted specifically at journalists to get their attention. For the broader blog, it's not always necessary to promote the product in posts as just talking about the industry in general and showing the human side.
It's a lot cheaper to set up a blog and blog on specific topics than to buy keywords.
However, beyond the log files and Google real metrics are very difficult to determine. Some tools are:
These sites are very different from Google in the way they search a site and establish authority. These services allow you to track specific searches via RSS feed and an aggregator.
Question from the audience about Alexa. The problem with Alexa is that it requires installation of the toolbar. And not a great number of people use the toolbar. This points to the larger problem of having terrible metrics for blogs generally. We are currently in a position similar to where search was before Google arrived. The industry is still figuring out the best was to search and sort blogs and RSS feeds. No one of the above services tracks everything about the blogosphere, so it's important to use all of them to track trends closely.
One issue about Google is that the priority for Google searching is authority rather than immediacy. Google searches can be older and rated by relevance according to Google. These other services rank results reverse-chronologically rather than by relevance.
An additional metric can be to use Bloglines and subscribe to a specific feed. Subscribers can see how many other subscribers there are to the same feeds they read. There are two drawbacks to the information gained from Bloglines. First, it tracks only subscribers in Bloglines and second people aren't all actively using their Bloglines account. Those drawbacks aside, Bloglines can help with comparative analysis. For instance, Bloglines shows 26k subscribers to BoingBoing, while Feedburner shows 1.2mm. The issue with Feedburner, however, is that Feedburner numbers aren't public so you can't do competitive research using the service. (I should also note that to reap the full benefits of Feedburner you need all your subscribers to be using the Feedburner feed for your blog. Blogging software doesn't come with a Feedburner feed set up.)
Beyond even these metrics issues is the fact that none of the services, including Google, can measure the kind of links a site is getting. Specifically, they can't measure if inbound links are from a blog post that is positive about your company, negative, or just a neutral pointer to your site.
The upshot seems to be that metrics are quite rudimentry right now, and in order to track what's being said about your company, you have to get out and read the actual posts. Mary is trying to establish what metrics are important to bloggers and hope to influence the blog search tool companies to track those metrics.
tag: blogbusinesssummit
