Business Blog ROI

Katie Paine has Shel Israel: As cheap as they are to set up and maintain, there's really no need to measure the ROI of blogs. Ed's note: How important is ROI when it comes to an active blog? Considering the lack of total costs, is this something that even needs to be measured? Share your thoughts at Murdok's newest forum, not important is a dollars-and-cents accounting. At the New Communications Forum, employee-written blog from Intuit's Quickbooks Online that resolves customer concerns equally justifies the amount of time employees spend generating content for the blog and offsets the concerns that an employee might say something wrong. After all, what's the value of turning a disgruntled customer into a satisfied one who sill sing a company's praises to friends, family, and (possibly) the audience of his blog readers? Not all measurement is ROI. Anecdotal evidence counts as measurement as much as numbers do; it's why measurement experts include both quantitative and qualitative measurement tools in their toolkits. But until management sees blogging as indispensable as the phones-or their pants-I'll continue to recommend that the benefits and outcomes are measured, even if only anecdotally. Katie concedes that there are some things that don't need to be measured. I agree: Pants and telephones are two great examples. But executives aren't arguing that pants are unnecessary or that telephones pose unnecessary risks. For skeptical executives, measurement remains the most convincing and compelling tool for changing minds. Add to Yahoo! My Web Technorati: Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications. As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog