(Originally published March 25, 2005)

Media Matters

How To Measure Blogs,
Part One
... and what to do with the data
once you have it.

By Katie Delahaye Paine and Andy Lark

Blogs, the Media Revolution
In his fascinating "Power, Pleasure, Patterns, A Conceptual History of the Mass Media in the United States," Joshua Meyrowitz of the University of New Hampshire suggests that every new media, from the printing press to the Internet, creates a power struggle over access to wealth, resources and power. Guttenberg's printing press wrenched the power of the written word out of the hands of the Church. Several centuries later the newspaper helped foment the American Revolution. In the 1830s the Penny Press brought the news to the masses causing the start of advertising-based publishing.

Blogs are already wrenching power away from corporations and putting it into the hands of individuals. Each century has seen its media revolution and blogs (short for "Web logs") are clearly the media revolution of this new century. Thanks to advances in technology that have made it incredibly easy and virtually free to create them, blogs are turning both the communications and PR measurement world upside down.

More and more independent bloggers -- be they journalists, pundits, experts or ordinary gadflies -- are taking to the Internet to put forward their views to anyone who will listen. A new blog is created about once every two seconds. See this blog for more on the growth of blogs. But despite its strong growth, blogging is not yet a very widely used medium. Most Internet users (62%) do not know what a blog is, and 73% of US Internet users do not read blogs, according to this Pew survey.

Still, blogs are shaking the communications world, as PR people envision yet another new medium to address and PR researchers rethink their approaches as well. The normal maxim for measurement is, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." The problem with measuring blogs is not how to do it, but rather that the nature of blogs renders management impossible. You simply can't "manage" what 10 million independent-minded, opinionated people are going to say. And woe to those who try, since the blogosphere resembles nothing more than a cornered porcupine that will automatically begin to throw darts the moment it sees someone trying to control it.

This paper looks at both the tools and techniques that can be used to get a handle on this phenomenon, as well as provides advice to communications professionals on what to do with the data once they have it.

Part One of this article describes the basic structure of a blog measurement program and a few of the tools available for measurement. Part Two, coming in next month's issue, will describe more sophisticated methods of blog measurement as well as discuss ways to participate in the blogosphere.

What's the goal?
Like any other form of communications, before you start trying to measure blogs you need to know what your objectives are. And, as with any other measurement program there are essentially three things you can measure: outputs, outtakes and outcomes.

Outcomes:
Measuring How Blogs Affect People's Behavior and Relationships

Outcomes are defined by the Institute for Public Relations as (1) quantifiable changes in awareness, knowledge, attitude, opinion, and behavior levels that occur as a result of a public relations program or campaign; (2) an effect, consequence, or impact of a set or program of communication activities or products, and may be either short-term (immediate) or long term.

Financial Outcomes: In the blogosphere, outcomes can be financial or relational. If the objective of a blog is financial -- i.e. to raise money (e.g. www.blogforamerica.com) or sell something (fastlane.gmblogs.com) -- the metrics and the math are very simple. What was the cost per clickthrough, cost per sale, cost per lead or the cost per dollar raised?

If the objective is not as directly commercial, e.g. you want to move people along the purchase cycle, you can measuring the number of people who click through from a blog to your site. By assigning specific and unique URLs to links, it becomes very easy to track the click through rate from individual blogs. To determine the efficiency, divide the cost of the program with the number of clickthroughs to get cost per clickthrough.

Relationship Outcomes: However, if your objective is to establish or improve relationships, the metrics are quite different. The strength and power of the blogosphere is in the networks it creates and the relationships you can form.

In the traditional marketing space, we would recommend surveying customers to determine the strength of their feelings towards your brands on issues like trust, satisfaction, commitment and control mutuality. However, the nature of the blogosphere is to eschew traditional marketing techniques in favor of far more direct interactions. Woe be it to the poor marketer who makes an obvious attempt to "manage" bloggers or somehow shield their company's reputation. The blogosphere is rife with snide comments and occasional downright hostility towards marketers' blundering attempts to interject themselves into a conversation.

That's not to say that some attempt to measure relationships shouldn't be applied. If you have a mechanism to capture emails of people who have visited your blog, you could conduct an email survey using Dr. Jim and Laurie Grunig's relationship measurement instrument (available from The Institute for Public Relations).

However, that level of direct interaction with readers and posters is not possible with the vast majority of blogs. This leaves us several indirect measures.

1. Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments and the number of trackbacks is one indication of the size and scope of the network surrounding your blog. Whether or not those comments are in agreement or disagreement requires content analysis, but presumably positive or neutral comments would be indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his/her audience.
2. Examining the credibility and authority of the people who are commenting and/or linking to the site is another way to assess the impact and importance of the blog.
3. One needs to look beyond just quantity of postings or links to the quality of the dialog. I like the way Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University categorizes blogs in his classroom and have adapted his categories below:
   • "Coverage" -- The number of times your brand or issue is mentioned.
   • "Depth" -- How deeply does the posting discuss the brand? Is it just a passing mention or does the blogger go into the subject in depth with numerous links?
   • "Interaction" -- What was the nature of the interaction? Was the posting designed to solve a problem, compare different brands, or simply allow the author to rant?
   • "Discussion" -- What was the nature of the discussion? Was it a true dialog with extensive exchange of ideas, or was it just bantering back and forth.

   Jerz further classifies comments as:

• Comment Primo -- a comment that launches a discussion on someone else's blog
• Comment Grande -- a long comment posted on a peer blog, which is then advertised via a cross-blog posting
• Comment Informative -- in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer's blog entry
• Link Gracious -- a link that draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else's blog
• Consider also adding Tonality, an indicator of the health of the relationship between the blog community and the brand. If the tone of the posting leaves a reader less likely to do business with your organization it is negative. If the posting leaves a reader more likely to do business with your organization, or recommends the brand, it is positive. If it essentially just discusses facts it is neutral or balanced.
4. Social Capital and Social Networking measures. There has been extensive research done by Robert Putnam and others on the value of social capital and social networks. In essence, for an individual, the more relationships you have, the better your life is, the longer you live and the healthier you are. For a company, good social capital means that information flows more easily, innovation and efficiency increase and legal costs go down. You can extend this concept to the networks created by blogs. If a blog is generating favorable comments, engaging employees or customers in the business of the organization, and disseminating information quickly and accurately, it is contributing to the social capital of your organization. Again, the challenge is that in order to understand and measure your social network you need to analyze the content of all the blogs that are discussing your organization.

Outtakes:
Measuring What Readers Understand From Blogs

According to the IPR's Dictionary of Measurement Terms, "outtakes" are: (1) measurement of what audiences have understood and/or heeded or responded to a communication product's call to seek further information from PR messages prior to measuring an outcome; (2) audience reaction to the receipt of a communication product, including favorability of the product, recall and retention of the message embedded in the product, and whether the audience heeded or responded to a call for information or action within the message.

To determine what readers are taking away from a blog, the medium offers several interesting opportunities for measurement. What your customers say about you in the chat rooms, news groups and blogs presumably reflects what they think about you. So if they're telling their fellow cyber whiners that your product sucks, chances are they're not buying into your messages. On the other hand, if they're repeating a phrase or a message that you put out in your latest press release, it means they're listening. So in essence, paying close attention to what is being said in the blogosphere is a great way to get inside your customers' minds without doing a survey. This requires a thorough content analysis of what the postings actually say.

Content analysis of blogs should include an analysis not just of the above mentioned characteristics, but should also look for messages and themes. How does the blogosphere position your brand on issues like employer of choice, value, or customer service? A good analysis will pull out recurring themes, complaints, and messages and quantify them to determine if they require action or can be ignored.

Does that mean slogging through 1000 postings a day? Not necessarily, it depends on several factors. First of all, how frequently does your brand (or the competition) appear, and how important to your audience are the blogs in which it does appear? You only want to read postings from the blogs and sites that really matter to your target audiences.

CyberAlert, the Connecticut based on-line clipping service, offers several methodologies that rank order blogs to help you set priorities.

• Web Rank: Web Rank is the rank of the site in numerical order of all Internet sites worldwide, based on a sample of millions of Web users who have voluntarily installed a special measurement toolbar in their Internet Explorer browser. The special toolbar aggregates data on sites visited while users browse the Web. The Web Rank takes into account both the number of visitors to a site and the average number of page views by each visitor while browsing the site. The Web Rank is based on three months of aggregated traffic data and is updated monthly. The measurement system includes the rank of Web-based forums, message boards and discussion groups, but does not measure the rank of clips from Usenet News Groups.
• News Rank: News Rank is the numerical rank of the Web site among the 20,000+ worldwide news sources monitored daily by CyberAlert. This rank provides a good indicator of the relative importance of a news source among online news sources worldwide.
• Reach/Million: Reach per million measures the number of daily visitors to the Web site as a percentage of all Internet users. It is a measure of market penetration. A reach of 22% indicates that, for every one million Internet users, 220,000 visit that particular site each day. For most news sources, the reach/million is based on the visitors to the main domain name. For Internet portals like Yahoo, the reach/million is based on the number of visitors to the relevant news or discussion section of the main domain. For blogs, reach/million measures the reach of the main domain, not the individual blog.
• National OTS (Opportunities to See): National OTS estimates the number of daily visitors to the Web site from the site's home country, based on the site's rank, page views, reach per million and total number of Internet users in that country. The figure does not include visits by users from other countries. For most news and consumer discussion sites on the Web, this figure is the closest possible equivalent to the base circulation figure of print publications.

Getting the content: Since there are over 10 million blogs out there, one needs to carefully evaluate the claims of the various monitoring services. As of this writing, the free service PubSub monitored 8.8 million blogs, Technorati monitors 7.7 million, Feedster monitors 5.4 million and Intelliseek analyzes 3.5 million blogs. On the other hand CyberAlert claims 16,000 "online sources" (not necessarily blogs) CustomScoop claims 6,000, BurrellesLuce claims 1000 and Bacon's claims 91.

Figuring out what it says: Postings and comments in blogs can take many different forms. Some may be complaints about customer service, others may be speculation on stock price, and still others may be protests over personnel policies. So the next step in setting up a blog measurement system is to make a list of the various categories the postings fall into and to prioritize the categories. Are they all equally important, or are there some that are potentially more damaging or require faster action?

In the media and in most news groups the vast majority of what is said about a particular organization is neutral. But the unfettered and unfiltered nature of the blogosphere brings more opinions and frequently more negative opinions. Remember to step back as far as you can and remain objective. Think like your target audience. Just because someone leaked a piece of information or got a name wrong is not reason to respond or get involved in a discussion.

There are a number of tools to make the process easier. Cymfony offers a Digital Consumer Insight tool that uses Natural Language Processing to analyze consumer discussions, trends and sentiment expressed in blogs, message boards, customer feedback sites, consumer emails, and Usenet groups. Digital Consumer Insight analyzes over four million consumer postings per day. However, computers can't tell the difference between irony and sarcasm, so don't rely on a computer to determine tonality.

Outputs:
Measuring Blog Activity

The IPR dictionary defines outputs as: (1) what is generated as a result of a PR program or campaign that impacts on a target audience or public; (2) the final stage of a communication product production process resulting in the production and dissemination of a communication product (brochure, media release, web site, speech, etc.); (3) the number of communication products or services resulting from a communication production process, the number distributed and/or the number reaching a targeted audience.

At the most basic level, if you are hosting your own blog, the server log files can tell you how many visitors there have been, how long they stayed and where they came from. Of course the term "visitors" must be taken with a grain of salt, since the technology behind determining a visitor is far from perfect, as it makes very generalized assumptions about human behavior. More sophisticated tools like ClickTracks and WebTrends provide far more data and unlike your basic log files, can display it in an understandable way.

The next level of response is the clickthrough, literally, when a visitor clicks a link that enables him/her to take action -- e.g. donate money, buy something, ask for more information, or volunteer. The percentage of visitors who take action or click through is a fundamental measure of success. More importantly, if you factor in your budget, you will determine your cost per clickthrough which can be easily compared to other Web marketing tools.

More Blog Measurement Next Issue!
The most important part of any measurement program is teasing insight from the data and drawing actionable conclusions. The most important analysis is to look at trends over time. What happened yesterday or last week is important, of course, but what you need to do is to see if complaints are going up or down over time, or if your relationships are getting better or worse over time, or if the ranks of complainers is growing faster than the ranks of supporters. Tune in next month for how to find these answers and more...

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