Been tired today but decided to post, after finally getting done lounging after my first full week of work at Monster.com and partying last night with old friends at Florants in the West Village.
While reading A framework for measuring blog success by Greg Verdino in Social Media Today, which focuses on a proposed Social Media Measurement standard for blogs, I had to chuckle. I mean, the ideas that Greg has are good, but, like so many marketing types - they're vauge enough to make it difficult to measure in the way he proposed, in my opinion.
It reminds me of "engagement" metrics - that no one seems to be able to define well enough to measure - there's no standard, actually.
Here's the framework Greg Verdino proposed (below) as a slide show:
And here's a chart I put together which might work, if we could just agree on a couple of hazy points:
Greg wants to "bridge the gap between participation and conversation" but doesn't say how that's going to be done or measured:
"…in some ways the ultimate measure of whether your audience is truly engaged and finds value in (or takes issue with) the content you offer, bridge the dual worlds of Participation and Conversation. Comments are a measure of your community's participation but also the basic building block of dialogue (conversation) between you and your audience and directly among audience members as well."
Assuming he's got the all the right measurements - we'd have to decide how to weight each one of them, and in some cases, decide what we're actually going to count. Areas that are hazy to me are counting and weighting comments (should they be counted twice but weighted half as much as the other measures?).
Embeddable content (Widgets) also is going to be difficult to get the data on (unless they're Google Gadgets - which you can get data on), while Search Optimization would require running ranking reports against the keywords that are important to the blog across major search engines and message boards (problem is, do you use the keywords that are important for the blog - if you can figure them out - or the keywords they're all competing on - assuming they're going after the same audience).
Then again, how to we measure visits and then weight them?
I'm glad people like Greg Verdino and David Armano come up with this kind of stuff, these kind of charts - but as far as I'm concerned, they ought to work more with Web Analytics in order to figure out if the stuff they're proposing is actually something that can be measured and rated. I don't think they do that.
(maybe they want Web Analysts to "bail them out") - Yep, that's what I think it's all about - they'll go around creating pretty charts that look nice and make you feel good - and depend on people like me to try to figure out how to measure the stuff - when they should have come up with these ideas with the analysts they work with first - and then publish.
Finally, how does one decide that "…the content you offer, bridge the dual worlds of Participation and Conversation."
How is that going to be defined? (Formulas, please) (Gotcha, you don't have one…right?)
That's what I mean, you let Marketers, alone, dictate what needs to be measured and you end up with a headache … which is what I'd have were I actually to try to do the calculations on the chart I added, above.
Not only would it be a lot of work to collect all the measurements on a regular basis, but I'm not sure if the setup would be really fair.
Here's what I mean - if your comparing blogs for RSS Subscribers and one blog has been in existence longer than the other - it may well have more subscribers than the others, all else being equal. If your going to count subscribers wouldn't it also be necessary to factor in how long the blogs have been in existence - and come up with some kind of "Delta" or "ramp" for each one, and compare that?
What I'm suggesting then, is that Marketers work directly with Web Analysts to define and flesh out ideas before proposing them.
OK, maybe I'm in a bad mood today - but the pretty charts I often see …. are just… pretty charts.
