The Paine of Measurement

It Just Doesn't Matter!
Don't Bother Measuring Blogs

Having just wasted another hour or so in the blogosphere, I've come to the conclusion that most companies should not be measuring blogs at all. To quote Bill Murray in Meatballs, (one of my all-time favorite flicks), "IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!"

Okay, if you are Hewlett-Packard and people are trashing your product on www.gizmodo.com you need to know about it. But there are maybe a dozen or so blogs out there that qualify as "influential" and that's exactly .00008% of the total. If you are Raytheon, and there are a hundred people on the planet who are allowed to buy your products, I can promise you that the purchasing decisions of those hundred are not going to be unduly influenced by what's being said in the blogosphere.

This brings me to the big picture point here. Before you measure anything, you need to know what is influencing your constituencies to behave in the manner you desire. In other words, if you work for a company that sells things, before you start measuring anything, you need to know what motivates your customers to purchase your product. If you work for a non-profit, you need to know why people volunteer, or give you money. If you work for a state, a city or a county, you need to know what motivates voters.

Procter and Gamble knows that when it exposes enough consumers to pictures of its shampoo, tells enough people about the benefits of using its shampoo, and gets people to endorse the use of the shampoo, they sell more shampoo. They know this because they've been doing advertising research for years. So when they wanted to measure the effectiveness of their PR program, that's what they measured: their share of photos, share of coverage that recommended or endorsed a product and share of articles that discussed brand benefits.

When Rensselaer County New York wanted to change perceptions about development in the county, they knew that certain individuals in the community were "influentials" (see our book review of The Influentials by Ed Keller and Jon Berry) – i.e. people who motivate others to do something. The first step in their measurement program was to figure out their attitudes towards development.

At a major Boston-area medical clinic, they know from their research that what motivates patients to come to their clinic (as opposed to any of the other half dozen or so in the area) are recommendations by family, friends and primary care physicians, the belief that this particular clinic has expertise or specializes in their particular type of care and that the doctors are the best qualified. So they measure their doctors' share of authoritative quotes in the media, their positioning on industry issues such as patient safety and quality of care, and the degree to which they own the coverage of a particular medical specialty.

So where do blogs fit into all of this? If you know that your customers are generating buzz in blogs or chat rooms or newsgroups, then okay, pay attention. But if what happens in the blogosphere is irrelevant to the behavior of the people you are trying to reach, don't waste resources trying to measure it.

Don't get me wrong. I think the blogosphere is a great tool for research, and a very cheap and easy way to get customer feedback. And, yes, it can be a big threat if consumers start to seriously diss you. But unless you have unlimited budget and unlimited resources, think long and hard because, maybe, it just doesn't matter.

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