The ROI of Blogging -Forrester Report

January 29, 2007 in Blogging

The full report is available here for $379.00 US and it might be worth it if you need to convince a corporate client that they really need to start that blog. Charlene Li provides a few excerpts if if you don’t want to pony up for yet another report on the effectiveness of blogs.

Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove (sic) 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.

Unfortunately, most the corporate blogs I’ve read are nothing more than periodic press releases and the ROI analysis on those should be pretty simple. People don’t waste their time reading corporate schlock. Not sure about the value of the report either, in Charlene’s own words;

As you can see, this process and framework is not cut and dry, black and white. Rather, it’s highly subjective, requires tremendous judgment, and is open to interpretation. But it is a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.

So, a highly subjective report that is open to interpretation on a nebulous activity. Do you get the idea that the report may leave you with more questions than answers? Still, it’s interesting to see someone trying to quantify the benefits of blogging.

I’m really curious about this bit in the chart Charlene presented: ‘the number of clients/prospects who read the blog. Number of salespeople who the blog’ .

Should press mentions be the key metric in determining the value of a blog? Ponder that while you search for a good corporate blog to read.