Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Measuring The Brand Blog
The second part of the story, Measuring The Brand Blog, discusses the challenge of assessing the impact of a blog that has defined PR, marketing or even sales goals.
The advantage of a blog is that it can give you qualitative feedback. But how do you measure this feedback to monitor the success of your brand blog?
Here are some of the more important points the article covers.
- Some suggested measurement approaches include monitoring trackbacks, comments and monitoring the news for certain keywords, using cheap or free solutions like Google Alerts and Technorati search feeds, to services designed to discover keyword mentions across all online media.
- Free measurement techniques -- such as reading trackbacks and comments -- require a time investment. Sophisticated software are expensive, but could be factored in when measuring ROI.
- Unique users and hits, the traditional metrics of Web site marketing, may be easy and important to gauge, but may not be a smart measure of a blog's qualitative impact.
- Steve Rubel suggests that brands ought to apply qualitative benchmarking to measure a blog's impact, such as brand attitude surveys or a scoring system capable of rating every press comment or incoming link.
- Launching a promotion on your blog and measuring it's impact, could be another a way of assessing the blog's overall reception.
- Several experts suggested conducting random pop-up or roadblock surveys, and quantifying it like a focus group.
It sums up by advising brand blogs to combine surveys and rigorous benchmarking with the traditional means of self-monitoring that have always been used by bloggers, such as comments, trackbacks, and other forms of listening.
