Do you know why you write a blog?
March 23, 2009 by Chuck
Said another way…do you know what your ROI is from blogging? This post was inspired by the somewhat spontaneous conversation that took place on Twitter last night hosted by Mack Collier on the topic of blogging (for you Twitter users check out the hashtag #blogchat here). Many topics, including how to engage readers, transparency, and whether or not blogs were a potential channel for sales were discussed. After I left the conversation I began to wonder whether I was thinking about this blog in the right way (everybody has a different definition of “right” by the way). Am I doing everything I can to stimulate conversations? Is the tone right? How am I driving traffic to the blog? Is there another way that I can get people to come and post comments, or, at the very least, read the content? Do these posts come off as “mini-thought-pieces” and not “conversations?” Do I want to have “conversations” seeing as how this blog is housed on a corporate Web site?
These are all questions that will continue to float around in my head, but I think a larger question needs to be asked: Why am I blogging in the first place? I started this blog because I thought I had a unique perspective to share with my community, but how do I know? How do you know if you have a unique perspective or are sharing interesting things with your community? How should I measure my success? Number of comments received? Page views? Or time spent on the site? What?
The beautiful thing about the practice of public relations, perhaps communications in general, is that we are constantly evolving and learning new things. So while readership, comment count, time spent on your site and other analytics are nice, looking at those sorts of things exclusively is a vanity exercise in my opinion. The more important question to ask is have you sparked a conversation or given your readers something to think about? Yes, those are likely to be immeasurable things, but that doesn’t bother me. My purpose in writing these posts is to give you my point of view and then hopefully spark a conversation. If I receive only one comment on a post that leads me to further define my (or the community’s point of view), then I think I’ve done my job and received tremendous value from writing the posts.
Hokey? Perhaps. What about you? Why do you blog?