View From Professional Services: Measuring Blog Engagement

November 17, 2008 Michael Cook — 4 comments

One of the best parts of my job is talking to customers about their current business challenges.  Most of them agree that the age of one way online communication is dead.  Website visitors no longer want to be talked at, they want to have online conversations.  These conversations take a number of types, but blogs are currently the most prevalent and popular form.

Sometimes organizations undermine their own blogging efforts by treating it like any other communication medium.  Sure, blogs can still be used for one way communication, dumping information on the visitors without allowing a reasonable means for them to respond.  However, truly successful blogs are the ones that engage users in a dynamic, on-going conversation.  If you want to take your blog to the next level, you must commit to encouraging that conversation.

It’s not that difficult to take that extra step and get your readers excited about your blog.  It’s basic human nature for your visitors to want to contribute their thoughts and add their voice to the marketplace of free ideas.  Sometimes a visitor believes he can add to the conversation and sometimes he simply wants to disagree.  The standard blog commenter interaction model is illustrated below.

If a visitor contributes to the conversation, he is much more likely to return to see other visitors’ replies.  Then he may post again or read new content, raising the frequency of his visits, as well as his overall level of engagement.  The trick is to inspire users to move from being passive readers to active contributors.  This is the point where standard web analytics metrics break down:  knowing what content visitors are looking at is only half the story.  We need to see both sides of the picture.

WebTrends Analytics offers Consumer Generated Media tracking parameters and by utilizing these parameters we can really dig into the data and markedly improve that conversation.  Custom Reports, like the example below, provide the data needed to optimize a blog.  This report lists the blog author, the blog article, and the associated key metrics of posts (the number of blog posts), Comments (the number of comments by visitors), visits, and page views.

As you can see, some bloggers and topics inspire more comments than others.  Using this data you can proactively select topics that will encourage visitors to post comments or identify visitors who inspire less interaction.  Understanding your audience and catering to them appropriately should be one of your main goals.

Another easy win is to evaluate the amount of effort required for users to post comments.  Some blogs require full registration and verification, while others simply require a few pieces of data.  If you are using the former model, you can evaluate what content is pushing users to register using Path Analysis or Custom Reporting.  More importantly, you can evaluate if users are deciding not to post comments because they do not want to go through the registration processes.  You may find visitors are ending their visits due to their frustration with your registration process.  Obviously, this type of visitor alienation is extremely detrimental to the long term growth of your blog.  A more open commenting system facilitates increased interaction and dramatically reduces visitor frustration.  The  trade- off here is that more time is required to moderate an open comment system and control spam and potentially offensive comments.  However, this is usually more than worth the trouble because it results in substantial growth for your blog.

To address the needs of customers using blogs or other community based tools, our team offers a number of “Web 2.0″ consulting packages which will enable you to apply the strategies detailed in this article to your web properties. How are you tracking your onsite communities today? What about your other social media inititives?

CATEGORIES: Emerging Technologies Industry Perspectives Marketing Optimization

TAGS: blogs Custom Reporting web 2.0