forumforfuturemarketing

By the technological convergence of media, IT and telecommunication, weblogs are generated as a new phenomenon of communication. More and more companies include weblogs strategically into their marketing mix for specific corporate and brand communications. In the USA there are already more than 5.000 corporate blogs, in Germany more than 300.
The Top-10 corporate blogs are ranked by different institutions with varying criteria. The following Top-10-list arranged (by technorati in May 2008) two main criteria: popularity (number of blogs linking to a website in the last 6 months, the higher the number, the more authority the blog has) and the number of blogs vs. number of links that’s being measured.

Figure 1: Top 10 Corporate Weblogs in the world
(source:http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/top-15-corporate-blogs-ranked-may-2008/)

Characteristics

A weblog is a website with entries posted from individuals. Weblogs used to passing some news about a specific topic (in regular sequence), discuss with the target group, knowledge transfer, gather and exchange bookmarks, building and cultivating individual contacts or networks, etc. The entries of a weblog are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.
There are many different types of blogs differing in type of content and the way that content is created: Personal blogs (Diaries), corporate blogs, blogs differing by media types (e.g. videoblog, photoblog, …), by devices (e.g. blogs written by a mobile phone or PDA called moblog) or by genres (e.g. fashion blog, education blog,…).

Regular elements of a weblog

Figure 2: Elements of a weblog

Entries (or post)
Contains the information written by individuals.

Tags
Keywords or terms associated with or assigned to a piece of information from the posts.

Comments
On weblogs it’s possible to publish your own opinion to a specific post. The comments are indicated on the same site like the post.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks
A trackback or pingback is a method for weblogs to request notification when somebody links to one of their posts.

RSS Feed
RSS Feeds contains a summary of content from a weblog post (or the full text) and makes it possible for people to read the post without visiting the weblog. RSS Feeds can be read using e.g. an aggregator (Feedreader e.g. netvibes.com).

Menu
It contains e.g. last post, last comments, archive, tag cloud, …

Blogroll
It’s a list of favourite blogs which is important for crosslinking within the blogosphere.

Strengths

with weblogs you have contact to your target group and can create relationships.
Weblogs offer the possibility to enter in a real dialogue with the target group. This dialogue is engaged by a “secondary” bottom-up-communication, in which the communication is activated by a top-down-process (blog-entry) in a combination with the feedback-channel (comment). The offered function of commenting the certain blogs-entries enables the company to get to know scores of readers and to exchange opinions. By reading and commenting the blog-entries, the reader spends time on the weblog and increases his brand-involvement. The reader deals with the blog and therefore he also deals with the brand.

Weblogs can create transparency of our business. Goal: credibility and authenticity.
Using a blog and the blog-entries it gets possible providing a certain business-transparency to the customer and meeting their demands. In addition reliability and confidence in-between the target group and the company is generated. This confidence is also raised by the authenticity of the authors, who are closely connected to the company (e.g. staff).

Weblogs can create a huge range.
Customer Evangelist get others excited about a brand using the viral force of word of mouth. Weblogs are particularly suitable for bringing the brand and the Customer Evangelists together. The more often Blog-Entries are cited by other bloggers or journalists on their blogs or websites, the broader is the coverage. In releasing a positive word-of-mouth (in combination with the mentioned synergy effect), the attention and the reporting on the internet can be increased immensely. If certain relevance is given, there might also be a reporting in offline-media.

Weaknesses

If more than one author is writing, it’s difficult to control the quality of the weblog posts.
Indeed contents can be published faster and directly by the reduced publishing-process, but this happens without any editorial control. Thereby it’s the danger, that the power of opinion of one person affects disproportionate. Furthermore, negative opinions can be communicated uncensored in these transparent ways of communication. In contrast to editorial staff there’s no equal screening authority. It get’s worse, when the negative voices are heard and reproduced. Actually it is possible, that a crisis in communication turns out into a crisis of the company.

The comment function is dangerous.
In placing blog-comments anonymous and code-named with wrong identities, there’s high danger of negative attacks started by cyberstalkers or spammers.

Measurement

Figure 3: Weblog Measurement

Web Metrics

Unique Users
Unique Users is a measurement which identifies the clearly (organic) visitors of the webpage. Unique Users usually generate  more than one Page Impression. Unique Users are measured over a standard period of time, typically a month.

Post views
A post view is a request to load a single Entry-page of a Weblog.

Recurring User
Recurring User means the average circular Users.

User time spendings
User time spendings is the average time who unique users surf on the weblog and read some articles look to the blogroll, etc…

Content Metrics

Post frequency
The post frequency shows the average time period between the publishment of posts.

Words per Post
This measurement shows the average numbers of words in post in a standard time period or all post in a weblog.

Keyword density
Keyword density is the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page.

Response Metrics

Comments
This measurement shows the number of comments from a single post, or all posts or the average number of comments from all posts or from a standard time period.

Referrals / Backlinks /Trackbacks
Referrals / Backlinks show the Number of Unique Blogs that link to your Blog or discuss your posts.

Active (circular) contributors
This measurement shows the loyalty rate of your visitors, specially of your contributors. This is the first step to measure the relationship between blog/brand and the consumers. You can measure the active contributor from every post, all posts or from a standard time period.

Costs

Technology
Cost for running a webserver, database, etc., maintenance of them, weblog support, domain renewal,…

Time spendings
To run a weblog successfully you need time for related blog activities. The staff who is appointed to writing posts, editing them, replying to all the emails and comments getting specifically for blog posts, etc… cost a certain amount per hour.

Opportunity costs
If the staff is not blogging, they would probably do something else, something that tentatively be worth money.

Key performance indicators

Raw Author Contribution
The Basics to creating a range, audience and relationships are the entries of your weblog. For this reason we must measure the posts, the raw author contribution: 1. Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging 2. Number of Words In Post / Number of Posts

Conversion rate
A weblog should open a dialogue and conversation with the target group and create a social environment. With the conversion rate we can measure it basically. Conversation Rate = Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

Holistic Audience Growth
The Measurement of the hole range of a weblog we need two different views: 1. „Onsite“ Audience Growth: compute Visitors (Visits) and Unique Visitors. 2.“Offsite” Audience Growth aka RSS/Feed Subscribers.

Citations
A key validating factor for a weblog is that other people talk about what you are writing about. They reference and link back to you. People talk about you, discuss you point, throw up on you, praise you. Citations are the Number of Unique Blogs that link to your Blog or discuss your posts. Citations: (median of links in Google and Technorati Rank)+ keyword search (brand name) in blogs

Freshness factor
The Freshness factor estimates how affects content changes the visitor’s frequency. Freshness factor: average ratio of content changes/ average unique visitor’s frequency

Stickiness
The stickiness measures the attraction of single posts. Stickiness: frequency (visits/ unique user) x exposure time (minutes / visits) x post view (user / total user of weblog)

Download the presentation (english only) or the management summary (english only).

Sonja Prinz & Sylvio Teubert