Determining ROI of Corporate Blogging
Forrester technology analyst Charline Li hits the nail on the head in her post yesterday about the challenge of Calculating the ROI of blogs.
For those armed with the desire, tools and techniques to build traditional valuation models (analysts), finding a solid set of metrics on which to create a surefire way to measure the ROI of a corporate blogging investment can be elusive. While difficult to measure in exact numbers though, my personal experience with the corporate blog has made me a devout believer and evangelist that some of the returns are indeed tangible.
For example, after doing a pseudo blog for a couple of years on my old corporate website (the site looked like a blog but I was just building it by writing my own html for each entry, only updated a couple times a quarter)I started this real blog in February of 2005 on the Movable Type platform.
During my journey with this blogging tool so far the biggest measurable performance increase from making a blog the foundation of my online corporate presence has without a doubt been the steady and measurable increase in traffic. Though the total audience for ContentDeveloper.com is relatively small, the rate of growth in audience is worth a look for a small business, or large business for that matter, looking for cost effective and easy to implement ways to get traction for their message.
I haven’t bought any google adwords to promote ContentDeveloper.com, been featured in any news articles or issued any press releases promoting this site (those can all be effective and smart things to do, I just haven’t done them or earned them), so one could reasonably argue that this growth can most likely be attributed primarily to a form of organic SEO.
One might argue that as the web audience grows the audience for just about any website will grow as well — the rising tide lifts all boats theory. That argument has some appeal to me, but as I look at the relative slow growth/flat traffic patterns for some other non blog sites I have access to audience data on, this argument begins to lose weight with me. This is confirmed when I spend some time combing my own access log and see the primary ways people are getting to this site. The logs reveal the source of this organic SEO has been a nice mix of traffic originating from links from other sites, referrals from next generation search tools like technorati, icerocket and pubsub along with search results from traditional search and new blogsearch tools from mainstream search names like google, yahoo and msn search.
Seeing the huge variety of search terms that lead people to this site is educational indeed. Those people just wouldn’t find me with my old corporate brochure style site. Add to this the still small but increasing portion of the web audience who consume the majority of their content via RSS readers and the case is only made stronger for the blog. This portion of the audience create some new challenges for measuring their activity, but fortunately tools like Feedburner have quickly added tools and services that are making it easier.
Though only anecdotal, my conversations with other bloggers reveal their experience to be the same. Some of them are more effective bloggers than me and get more activity and greater relevancy from links from other sites, but the general point is consistent. For organic SEO alone, there is a strong case to be made that corporate blogging is more than worth the investment in time. And that is really what the investment is, time. Infrastructure and tools can be had now for literally nothing.
Add in those other even more difficult to measure but important factors like the value of creating new conversations with new people and the unique impact of open dialogue over manufactured message and it becomes difficult to make a case that there is currently another more effective route to take for a corporate web presence.
There will always be a need for some traditional brochure style items needed to communicate what your brand is all about, but the time may have arrived where those blunt marketing instruments should be subordinated to the opportunity to establish a direct connection between your company and your customer.
And, to close on a local corporate blogging side note, this just arrived in an email from the San Antonio Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators.
—snip from iabc email—-
Tuesday, June 27
Thanks for the mention, I hope we can do the topic justice. And hope to meet you sometime too? IABC lunch anyone?