Credit given where Credit is due - The Web Analytics Digest on Yahoo Groups that Eric Peterson started has supplied me with a lot of good information, including reference to an article from ClickZ on how to measure Blog Influence.  Kelly Abbott is  Dandelife’s CEO and writes on how to measure the influence of a blog.

"….it is possible to hold a ruler up to the blogosphere and calculate just how much chatter is being generated around your brand." (Dandelife can chart the "chatter" and I covered that in an earlier Webmetricsguru post).

Any decent Web Analytics package will do - be it Google Analytics or HBX, or a bunch of others I can rattle off.  Personally, I see no advantage with HBX but Kelly does.  It seems to me that Kelly Abbott is pretty much pulling the data the rest of us gather - PageViews (obsolete according to my last two posts),  visitors, repeat visitors, and referrals from search engines, directly from other sites (such as blogs) and from bookmarks/emails (i.e. not linking from any other site at all).   ("use the example of iMedia Connection, which itself has some excellent chatter surrounding it. See for yourself. There are two numbers we’re going to be pulling from that page.

• 1)The first is the links. Those are the number of specific citations to the iMedia site have been made by other sites linking directly to iMedia Connection and any of its pages.
• 2)The other number is the number of blogs that are doing the linking. The number of links is always greater than the number of blogs.

1                         2

Rank: 686 (3,653 links from 1,400 blogs)

URL: http://www.imediaconnection.com

Kelly Abbott says that a search on Bloglines for citations should be close to the first Technorati number (3653), which it is (~4000) http://bloglines.com/search?q=Bcite:imediaconnection.com&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m

Now that we have the two numbers (links and blogs) we chart them over time to see how much they increase which shows the amount of "chatter" around your site/brand.

"Alexa: Amazon’s "non-scientific" consumer internet monitoring service. iMedia Connection Alexa rank is not what you want. That will measure your performance against other sites.

Really, all you want to do is to see how many visitors to your site Alexa is recording. Grab the weekly "reach per million" metric. The higher the number, the better. A number like 100 means, of 1 million internet users, 100 visited your site. Sites like Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and MySpace garner most of the attention. Have a look at the iMedia Connection weekly reach to see how they compare. For your Alexa rank, the weekly reach is good in and of itself. You’ll want to chart its change over time as well, but its freshness is not a concern here. You’ve addressed freshness by narrowing your metric to the past week. "

Here’s what Kelly is proposing as basic Buzz Monitoring Scorecard:

On a weekly basis, however, you’ll want to create a simple spreadsheet of fields that help you chart your site’s buzz over time. Here what I recommend:

• Technorati: Blogs linking to your site     (easy to get)
• Technorati: Total incoming links to your site  (easy to get)
• Bloglines: Citation search total (easy to get)
• Analytics: Pageviews  (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: New Visitors  (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Repeat visitors (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Referrals (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Organic (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Direct (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Datasource: New Members/Subscribers/Customers  (if applicable)
• Datasource: Revenues from (direct sales/affiliates/partners/resellers/etc.)  (if applicable)
• Alexa: Weekly rank                                     (if applicable)
• Email: Opens                                              (if applicable)
• Email: Clickthroughs                                 (if applicable)
• Email: Forwards                                         (if applicable)

Most of this looks to be pretty easy to collect - not all of it will be part of every site - but I could easily collect it for most of my clients.  Some of my Artist friends, one in particular, could benefit by doing the parts of this list that apply to her site.  I would easily do this for some of my newer clients such TheNewsMarket and GCS.

Kelly Abbott suggests you collect this data on a weekly basis and look at it over time and you can chart what makes sense for your site, including other KPI’s (ie: number of house plans sold, number of cart submissions, etc) to see the relationship of Buzz about your site and the other KPI’s your already collecting (or should be collecting) data on.