Found via Techmeme, I today read Charlene Li of Forrester, who yesterday in her corporate blog

references two reports on the ROI of Blogging, although if you not a Forrester client, you will need to purchase them. 

“The ROI Of Blogging: The “Why” And “How” Of External Blog Accountability”.

“Calculating The ROI Of Blogging: A Case Study, A Look At The ROI of General Motors’ FastLane Blog”. 

Charlene provides some very useful insights.  The following are only brief snippets:

The executive summary to the first report begins:

“Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dived in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. 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.” 

Charlene goes on to explain that:

“We developed a framework that allows companies to track and measure the benefits of external blogs. From the companies and individuals we spoke with, the most common benefits are: increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency. The hard part is coming up with metrics that reflect these benefits, and more importantly, how to value those metrics.”  

Whether you are in the game already, or thinking of joining soon, or only a very small company by comparison with General Motors, the message here is simply think about an easy and effective way to measure the value of your efforts in blogging, try it and establish if it is a framework that works for you.

As Charlene’s research concluded:

“But the key metric that we think drives the value of the General Motors blog was the number of press mentions it received, which we valued on the basis of "advertising equivalence" -- how much would it have cost GM to buy an ad in the same news outlet? This is a long standing metric used by the public relations industry to measure its value.” 

Adopting this measure alone, it would cost small businesses like mine a tiny fortune to advertise in the press.  Through blogging, it costs me only my time.