Elizabeth Albrycht poses several questions on the CEOBloggers blog about measuring the investment in this medium. These are great questions, Elizabeth, and thanks for starting this discussion. I look forward to following it.
First, in answer to your specific questions, I think about ROI a lot, and the reasons are two-fold. One, in my CEO role, if an activity isn’t contributing to the business overall, it shouldn’t be an activity of the business. Two, in my modern media consultant role, I must convince clients of the tangible value blogging has to their businesses. It’s all very good to be an evangelist of the medium and to confidently encourage ‘transparency” or the conversation model, but any good CEO needs to be convinced of its tactical and strategic values for the business.
I spend about 2 hours a day involved in blog activities, and generally this is an additional activity. I currently probably spend an equal amount of time reading blogs as writing. Blogs are a rich source of ideas and perspectives. Reading them helps me frame the role blogs play within the evolving business and social culture of modern media, and they help me understand where I can contribute to ongoing conversations. I view reading as valuable as writing. We have four blogs at the moment and three employees are blogging. We cover costs, it is done on company time (mine is usually done after business hours) and it is part of job responsibilities.
How do I measure the ROI? That is the meta-question for me. What I mean by that is it seems to me, we consistently focus on tactical ROI because it is concrete and easily measured; i.e., time spent, resources allocated, revenues received. But what we fail to do is develop credible ways to measure the strategic values that accrue to ROI – and that might be an even more important aspect of ROI.
The strategic value proposition is an inherent problem in almost all corporate communications. Professional communications functions are not seen as strategic values in most organizations, but as strictly tactical. Some of the blame for this rests with Communicators for failing to make the case and some with CEOs for failing to recognize it as such. Blogging has the potential to change that.
In fact, it is my belief that the real, ultimate value/ROI of blogs has little to do with the metrics. No, the real value in blogging is that for the first time, CEOs will experience and come to see the Strategic value of Communications with a big “S” and a big “C” because blogging makes them a breathing part of their own corporate communications.
How do I measure the innovations we may design because of an idea sparked or shared by someone online? How do we measure the goodwill or the problems that never arise because we are present with and to our customers? How do I measure the productivity that comes from collaborative thinking? Very hard to do tactically, but as every CEO knows – sometimes you just know it because you “feel” it.
I do believe, through discussion, we can frame a measurement of the ROI of blogging. But it must factor in strategic values as well as the tangible assessments – otherwise blogging is reduced to the same metric scales we use for traditional “broadcast” media which does not measure engagement. It is the problem we’ve had all along with the Internet – trying to measure it as broadcast instead of as social organism.
