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Is Blogging Worth It?
December 29th, 2005
What Is Blogging’s R.O.I.?
In one of his recent bizcard comics Hugh MacLeod asked What’s Blogging’s R.O.I. ? and offered a succinct answer. I point Hugh’s success with English Cut and Stormhoek to illustrate the worth of blogging. Hugh’s concept of the global micro-brand is a powerful one.
I’d like to turn a couple local firms into global micro-brands, but these firms are already established. There marketing is in place, they are growing successfully. English Cut is a blogging venture.
Naked Conversations, Offline
Local business celebrity Zingerman’s already has loyal customers through naked conversations, but those take place on the phone through their excellent customer service, and in their charming store front. They are one of the fastest grown companies in the US. Cluetrain? Yeah, they’ve got a clue. Oodles of clues.
No blog, however.
The Layman’s Version
Hugh gave an excellent recap of his experience with Stormhoek, in which he says…
Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months.
Hmm… Sounds like someone is offering a measurable R.O.I. after all. Thanks for the nice article Hugh! I can’t want to show it to some local businesses.
What is blogging’s R.O.I.? It sounds like management mumbo-jumbo, but return on investment is a schmancy way of asking one of life’s pressing questions. Is it worth it?
Is Blogging Worth It?
It’s a fair question. Conversations take time. Life is short.
Technorati Tags: blogging, Corporate Blogging, Social Networking
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Comments 
It’s so hard to cut through what’s 6 o’clock fodder these days, even for seasoned message-crafting pros. Heck, half the time, the PR pros are the ones creating unnecessary hype. But, if we can collectively stop kissing whatever it is we’re kissing, these corporate bloggers might actually have something valuable to say.
And, there is your R.O.I. Is it a bad thing to portray your company as knowing a bit about its own business? Authenticity and building trust are the intangibles that this type of effort can add to a brand. It helps reinforce all that advertising that we spend billions of dollars on each year.
Is it worth it? The only way to know is to draw up a plan and investigate. How much time will be spent creating content? How much time monitoring comments? Responding to those comments? It’s all the tangible time-spenders that everyone thinks of.
But what about learning curve? Learning how to manage the softward is more tangible. The intangible is managing that balance between blasting out the same talking points and actually saying something new. Without saying too much. Teaching corporate speakers to remove the jargon and talk like human beings again is always a good thing.
Even simpler, for some companies or websites, creating a blog is the easiest, fastest way to create content that attracts, retains and encourages repeat visitors to the site. A community forms. People like hanging out at “wherever”. Some may even click on a product, discover a service, buy a download. All of that is ROI.
The “meatspace” analog would be a booth at a trade show. You use games, giveaways, live presenters and stand up comedy, what have you, to compete for attention. People enter booth, enjoy, win prizes, hang about and listen to your presentation, some may turn out to be business, most won’t. Companies consider ROI for booths in terms of numbers of business cards, “leads”, survey forms filled out, a chance to “press the flesh”. But trade show professionals ‘know’ that the real ROI is in the presence, it’s noted if a big player doesn’t show. I’d say it’s all part of brand building.
At this early stage, you’re looking at a direct ROI, such as number of bottles of wine sold or suits measured. Eventually, a blog will as much be a “must” presence, as booths are in Comdex. Of course, trade show participation itself has gone down over the past 7 years, in terms of marketing dollars spent, but can you imagine CES without the presence of the biggest players? Similarly, Motorola launching it’s latest phones at CES wouldn’t count ROI on number of phones sold through the booth.
But to come back to your original question, is blogging worth it? Conversations take time. Life is short. Here I’d say, off the cuff, do you count the ROI when you sit down and have a conversation with a friend ? Or as a business owner, engage your client and find that rapport in solving a business problem together? It builds a relationship. Aren’t they worth it?
Niti, you could have skipped all the trade show stuff… some industries just dont’ have a trade show market. Or, in others, if a major participant doesn’t show, it sends the message that the *trade show* is somehow no longer the place to be.
I like your last graph, though, because so many companies miss the boat on building relationships. People (not simply, “customers”) don’t like to be spoken to in marketspeak. They want a human conversation, even with a company that is trying to sell them something. The company that makes the person the most comfortable will win the business. Some industries are much more high stakes in this arena than others, but it’s still a good goal.
How do blogs accomplish this? By stretching that “seven seconds” into minutes. We’ve accepted in online advertising that we have less than a second to cause someone to click. With a blog, we have a chance to capture an audience that won’t click an ad, even if you paid them. Talk to them, tell them what’s really behind your sales pitch, why you think you’re better, and how much you care about their business. Only then will that additional segment buy.
By the way, does anyone have any numbers on how many people actuallyl click? For example, of the x-million surfers who visit sites with ads, how many click? I can track my stuff once it’s clicked, but have heard all kinds of opinion of eyeballs that wander away.
My vice is circumlocution, and I was in the trade show business, so that was the easiest way for me to comprehend a blog’s relation to the customer facing aspects of business.
I tend to want to disagree with the constant need for metrics. It’s the bottom line mentality, one that I believe will get in the way of genuine corporate blogging, that trust and authencity that companies are after? I don’t think it’s going to come from measuring stuff like the number of minutes spent commenting or creating posts or what have you as tangible cost. Blogs are a conversation, a dialogue, a form of viral marketing of ideas, if you will, all interconnected. It’s early days yet, just as the internet is only now showing it’s true potential for revenue generation, I believe that firms should focus on building the blogs first, and later, once established, revenue streams will be discovered. Indeed, you are building a brand, first, i.e. establishing a bond between you and your reader, engaging their interest and building a long term relationship. Business will happen. But by measuring and wanting immediate profits you are hampering the true potential of a blog to build your reputation or establish your credentials.
Relationships are intangible. Using a metaphor here, ROI in the tangible terms you mention are the equivalent of costing the gifts and the price of dinners on a date, no? My blog has generated no revenue that I know of, but it has led to tangible opportunities for enhancing my personal brand that I can directly point to and say, that, that could not have happened were I not writing a blog.
I think I meant for the metrics to be a way to illustrate to others how blogging is not building a web site. Yes, I agree, this is a conversation and can be very viral. And there is no way to measure its effect.
Measuring a blog’s overall performance is like saying that you only need WOM to advertise, simply because it’s the first thing people cite as reference when people consciously think of why they purchase a good or service. It’s all interrelated: purchased advertising, natural media placements, and word-of-mouth (I feel that blogging falls into this category, otherwise it’s not a blog, and just more paid advertising, and will fail in generating anything).
The fact that relationships *are* intangible is what’s driving Alan’s question in this post. In a world of measuring everything, where does a blog fit in? How does it help meet sales/production goals? Does it? Does it even have to?
The only way to see the benefit of corporate blogging is to look beyond the numbers.
You are right on with your comments!