ROI of Corporate Blogging is Tangible

Jan 30, 2007

So says this article. Blogging is a bit tricky compared to other marketing efforts because you cannot predict the results in advance. It’s not like conventional advertising where you put ads on a website, or in a print publication where you’ve got the data of consumer behavior, say, for a few years.

A blog starts from the scratch and it evolves as a concept, and concepts always have their own peculiarities when it comes to giving a return. You cannot say that OK I’ll start this blog and in a year or so it’ll give me this much return. Blog readers are highly unpredictable and temperamental; setting up a PR rapport with them is extremely difficult, and time consuming.

But this shouldn’t act as a deterrence. In fact, since most of the blogging is emotional (advertising too is emotional but it is conspicuously artificial), you have a greater chance of hitting a chord with your readers compared to conventional advertising. The article says:

Take the imputed value of the FastLane blog, which is based largely on the assumption that press coverage of the blog is worth what it would cost to buy an ad in the publication where the article appeared.

I don’t completely believe that the sole purpose of corporate blogging is getting the press coverage. Blogs don’t depend on the press for readers. Blogs have this self-sustaining eco-system, that, if nurtured properly and methodically, gets you publicity from the web itself.

A system to calculate the blog RIO can be easily developed. In fact Charlene Li of Forrester Research in her recent post – titled New ROI of Blogging – writes:

While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

Together, with another researcher, she had done study on GM’s Fast Lane blog and found that the ROI of this blog in 2006 was 67%: the blog generated customer insight of worth $4,10, 470 at an annual cost of $2,55,675. Now for a company as big as GM these figures many not sound big deal, but in terms of the ROI percentage, they certainly are, and it is just a beginning.

In fact the recent post by Charlene (well, as always) is quite insightful. Sadly, the report mentioned in the post is available to only Forrester clients, or you purchase it by shelling out around $250.

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