Corporate blog or flog: Can you measure it?

As a public relations professional in a former life, I can understand the sentiment that “blogs are like PR – you know there is a benefit but it can be tricky to quantify it,” as Charlene Li of Forrester describes blog measurement.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase: PR is an art, not a science and therefore you can’t measure it. And then I was told to calculate (meaningless) impressions. Is it 2.5 times the circulation for newspapers? But we can round up to 25, right? Ha. Blogs have value (as does PR), but unless you can show a return on investment few businesses will post them.

Here are a few ways a company could benefit from having a blog:

• increased brand awareness
• increased web site traffic
• improved search-engine ranking
• establish authority on a topic
• a free focus group/a pulse on your customers
• potential for press coverage

As I’ve learned in my IMC classes, measurement starts with setting your goals, defining metrics—either absolute or proxy measures—that will tell you whether or not you accomplished what you set out to do, and finally turning your insights into actions. Remember that measures are just information. What matters is how you use that information to make decisions.

So what about ROI in dollars? Well, all you have to do is assign a dollar value to your metrics. What’s the cost of search engine optimization and paid search programs? How much would a traditional focus group cost? How much would it cost to hire a PR firm to generate publicity for you?

In scouring the web for examples of good corporate blogs, I found that GM and Sun Microsystems are often cited. In fact there’s a Forrester case study on the ROI of GM’s FastLane Blog. According to the blogger’s choice awards, Googleblog.Blogspot.com, Blogsouthwest.com and Inspiredprotagonist.com are the best corporate blogs. Maybe you have better examples.

So should all corporations have a blog? Not necessarily. You need a purpose, and it shouldn’t be self-promotion or direct-selling. You have to have something to say—a reason for people to read your blog. And the ones that get read are not written in “corporate speak.”

Whatever you do, just don’t create a “flog”—a fake blog. Wal-Mart tried to do this with “Wal-Marting Across America,” which chronicled the travels of a couple who drove their RV cross country, stopped in Wal-Mart parking lots and sang the praises of Wal-Mart’s low prices and wide selection of organic foods. It was soon exposed as a promotional tactic created by Edelman, Wal-Mart’s public relations firm.

I’m sure there’s more—well, there’d better be more since I found a $695 eMarketer report and a couple of Forrester research studies on blog measurement. But I’m not about to spend that kind of money to tell you about it.

Assignment: Which corporate blogs are successful and which ones are all about self-promotion?