Blogging Real Value
Categories: Web 2.0
Tags: blogs, charlene_li, enterprise_2.0, forrester, roi, social_media
Charlene Li at Forrester enriches her research about the ROI of Blogging publishing two new reports that present a framework and an example of application in a real case.
This is a fundamental study for medium-large companies that have to justify the effort expended in blogging, a traditionally hard to quantify activity. Blogs can be used for a variety of goals, gaining very different benefits and exposing the company to a number of risks as well. That’s why a scientifically exact, black and white framework for evaluating the ROI of blogging cannot be provided.
Starting from the more traditional value of public relations and interviewing a number of companies, the proposed evaluation model is made of three dimensions:
- Potential Benefits: different blogs mean different goals. Measuring benefits involves metrics to estimate value creation
- Potential Risks: blogs can involuntarily expose confidential, not yet disclosed information. The impact of such events have to be quantified and risk mitigation efforts can be put in place (through training, policies, posts reviews before final publication, etc). This mean additional costs that reduce the ROI.
- Potential Costs: costs are easier to evaluate and include setup, training and employee time to write posts and provide feedback to comments
The final ROI is: ROI = Benefits/(Costs + Risks) but again the right way to go is defining first your goals and only then benefits and metrics.
This measure can be used to maximize the returns from the effort spent in blogging or even deciding if blogging makes sense for you or not.
Examples of benefits, metrics and their values can be found into this picture (again from Forrester):
In this post, Charlene applies this schema to the General Motors’s FastLane Blog.
How can we come up with similar estimates for wikis and other enterprise 2.0 tools?
In the same category:
