There's No Bliss in Determining the ROI of Blogging

I listened in to a Webinar this week featuring Charlene Li, a principal analyst at Forrester Research and just want to share with you my take on it.  It was called "The ROI of Blogging".  As are most people interested in corporate blogging, I wanted to get an idea of how to deliver a proof-of-concept regarding the value of blogging to our business.  I try to be optimistic and hopeful with my blog posts, but I'll admit in this one that I was downright disappointed.

One of the first slides shown was about the new rules of “Influence 2.0”.  Those four rules are listening, authenticity, transparency, and participation.  Nothing new here, except that I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase “Influence 2.0” since last year.

Ms. Li spoke about how successful blog management requires measurement.  Go figure.  She said you have to justify the use of blogs to achieve business goals and compare blogs to other communication and marketing channels.  Okay, but how?  She then spoke about how to calculate the ROI of blogging, figuring it out based upon metrics in your organization.  However, these metrics are what confuses me.  What she’s talking about doesn’t exist in our world.  And, it would be counter to everything blogging stands for to make people register to read corporate blogs so that you can know when that person or company buys something from you.  Let's grab one of those rules of Influence 2.0 and be transparent:  we blog to deliver value to our customers and prospects.  In return for that, we get the attention of that audience which, these days, is limited and extremely valuable.

Ms. Li did give me some good ideas when she showed the uses of blogs and talked about the effect of blogs on customers, partners, and even investors.  She claims blogs affect investor sentiment, but there was no data to back this up.  Now, I'm the kind of person who ingests ideas quickly based upon experience and logic.  I don't need a lot of data.  However, in a large corporation, when you're selling a new idea like this, data REALLY helps.

The slides flipped by quickly and I couldn’t jot down what she was saying fast enough.  Basically, ROI equals the Benefits of Blogging minus the Costs minus Risk.  Now, in order to really get to the ROI number, you have to know a dollar value for the Benefits and Risk (Cost is easy).  She came up with examples for figuring out the value of Benefits and Risk, but these were based upon numbers pulled out of the air.  What she described appeared impossible to accurately measure, so I stopped writing for a few minutes, folded my arms, and raised my left eyebrow while I listened some more.

  Benefits of Blogging
- Costs of Blogging
- Risks of Blogging
  ROI of Blogging

At the end of the webinar, there was no offer to leave the audience with the slide presentation, so I can’t share it with you.  But, I did find that you can read her blog and ask her all the questions you want!  In the end, I think the “ROI of Blogging webinar” turned out to be a “Read Charlene Li’s Blog” advertisement.  Ever have one of those days?