BusinessWeek mulls goals and challenges in blogging

Comments are only one dimension. It's easier for users to share your content than to engage in conversation.

Tracking links (not just trackbacks) from short URL services (Bit.ly), bookmarking sites (Delicious) and mentions on Twitter a better gauge of how relevant my blog content is.

And tell John, if he axes your blog I will unfollow him on Twitter.

Signed,

http://twitter.com/joepemberton

I understand comments as some sort of measuring stick, but I don't think that's the way to do it unless the readers can vote on others' comments.

Sometimes I don't have anything to add to another's comments, but I want to voice my support. Other times I think the comment must have been written by the original poster's mother and is so off-base I can't believe the comment was even written. Either way, sometimes I don't have the time to write a response but would like to voice my support or opposition.

If you do post video, don't do vimeo as it's not compatible with iphones.

Your bloggers should definitely be on twitter. I've been on twitter for over two years and adore it. I love the instant feedback, the response if I need quick info, etc.

Typos and grammar is becoming a real issue. Just this morning I was listening to the morning podcast of the Wall Street Journal from Tuesday. The COLUMNIST said something was the "funnest". I was stunned and went back and played it again. I heard it right and he wasn't kidding. If people can't speak or write correctly without someone editing their words, this isn't the job for them.

Please, please, please understand that the tech audience isn't just a bunch of 20 something men. I am a 43 year old woman who is an early adopter, but there are a lot of us out here even older.

All for now, I'm off to class

In my opinion and experience, posting photos is an amazing way to drive traffic to a blog because they get picked up by Google images.

Also, bringing up the number of readers that subscribe to your RSS feeds is such an important question. The whole point of a reader is to not have to click on a million different sites, it's to have all your favorite sites in one place.

In addition, the readers that do subscribe to your feeds are so important because they are loyal. They are not random visitors that happened upon the site through a search- and I think they should be tracked as a priority.

Just some input since you asked

Your blogs should be distributed through multiple points of attraction i.e. Linkedin groups, Twitter, Facebook Groups, Stumble Upon, Ning centric platforms, related topical mdia blogs etc etc. Distribution assures attraction if you put the content in context to the audience

Besides reporting information good blogs should provide thoughts, response, ideation and feedback from the audience

Blogs should just report information but convey knowledge perspectives, innovative ideas and alternative views of the problem or event which provoked the writing about the topic.

Blogs should be in context to a conversation with the audience. A conversation stirs responses. Measurement of effectiveness is relative to the social currency of retweets, remarks, engagement etc. Measure of a good blog is centric to does it ignite a response, an engagement and participation. Measures of effectiveness should be tied to those attributes.

Commenting on others blog post with summary of your own post on relative subjects ignites awareness and possible engagement.

Do your blogs include distribution tools for sharing everywhere and anywhere?

Your doing video's but difficult to include in other blogs or share efficiently.

More later but those are my inputs for now.

One simple point. Your BX Linkedin group is static without many members. You should be pulling in thousands by contributing to outer groups and posting into your own group.

It would be beneficial for everyone with a Linkedin profile to leave a note about your recent blog post in the status box and provide a link to the post.

Additionally, is BW, journalist, reaching out and connecting with others on Linkedin.

Follow the five A's Attention, Attraction, Affinity, Audience and Actions. :)

This is a great discussion topic that BW opened up and thanks for the transparency. It's not something that I typically expect from a print-media organization gone digital, but really, I appreciate the piece.

I have a few quick suggestions:
-- Use Feedburner. While it may not be as sexy as a BW-branded email subscription, it provides a ton of metrics and analytics as to how people read content, what content they like and how people are getting to your content. After using Feedburner for our company, and frequently watching the metrics, it helps me as an editor discover what content people like and which content just didn't hit the mark. You can implement Feedburner in just minutes and allows people to take the blog content in via email or any RSS reader.

-- Turn over a bit of editorial control to users with UserVoice. I would think it would be nifty if BW leveraged UserVoice to allow tips, suggestions, hatemail and other commentary to the editorial team so they know what content people are dying to see. When you write about, respond to the suggestion and mark it as 'completed.' It might just be a great experiment that sticks.

-- Use multiple metrics to measure success. For some pieces, Comments may reign as if something was engaging. But it's very 1-sided... are people commenting in support of your views or on-topic? I believe that using a combination of traditional Web metrics (PVs, PV/U, Bounce %, etc) and a combination of social news "Diggs," and watching the mentions on Twitter (through BackTweets) would be a means to measure success on the blog.

-- Do it for the community. I caution any organization who engages in social media for the numbers and benefits. Do it for the community, the real reason why you're there and you'll connect with your audience. Sometimes they hate you, but it's only because they love you. Don't get wrapped in numbers, get fired up on passion and connection with the vast audience that BW has.

Thats my suggestions for now. They apply to virtually anyone who runs a blog or some editorial and wants to measure and improve it.

Love the blog and keep it up! :)

~Joe
@JoeManna on Twitter

Stephen, I agree with John about the "deepest and most meaningful engagement". We all respect people in organizations who have conversations with us, like you are. We don't want to read and be told things. I believe your approach is the right one. I do recommend that you take video much more seriously. There is a major, yet subtle trend going on today in how we choose to consume content. As you know, we process visual material faster, so it is not a huge surprise that YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine and sessions on YouTube are becoming longer over time. It's becoming a place to learn. In the case of BW, you have an opportunity to provide the best content/insights, plus video/audio for a full online experience.

All the best, Bob Pearson

Hey Steve,

I think there needs to be more chatter on your end about how these blogs intereact with what you're doing with Business Exchange...I go to the categories there a lot and a lot of the BW blog content hasn't been added under the categories. Use that as the first aggregator and then leverage Digg, StumbleUpon and everything else.

As far as engagement, I like the idea of more YouTube videos on the site. On our blog (@RaceTalk) we find higher engagement with posts that include embedded videos over ones that don't. Also, why not more live-blogging with IM type features around major announcements (iPhone event, earnings, etc). http://www.coveritlive.com/ is a good service for that type of live blogging. Also, I know you brought twitter functionality into BWX, any chance you could start bringing Twitter into the BW blogs? Your twitter handle on the side with your most recent tweets and reactions on here would be good.

- @kyledaustin

Steve,

I'm curious what your readers think about Blogrolls, too. Currently, BusinessWeek doesn't have the technology to include them with our blogs.

Personally, I think Blogrolls are a great shout out like-minded people. It's a bummer we can't use them now.

One of the biggest problems with journalists and blogs (and some of the BW journalists who keep blogs--present company accepted) is that they do not respond to comments. As I learned over the years of blogging (almost 5) that blogging works best when you acknowledge others. The reason people comment is because they have something to say *to* *you* not just to the myriad assembled rabble in the comments section.

Yes, sometimes conversations break out among commenters, but that's not always a given. That's one type of blog, one that is a community, but that's not always what happens on blogs.

It's also about, as Joe Pemberton mentions, tracking one's links, linking to others (no matter their status as bloggers.) It's about weaving your commentary in with the commentary of others via links. Acknowledging other bloggers by linking gets them to acknowledge you in return. You may know that from some of my blog posts that linked back to you, Steve. It made for goodwill between you and I--which is always a good thing.

And track your stats carefully! BW should be using stats packages on each blog (Google Analytics is great, as are others.) The blogger, not just the higher ups, should see which posts are getting the most traffic, which have a high bounce rate, what keywords are working to draw traffic, and a number of other things. Stats are invaluable (would be glad to come down to BW and give y'all a stats workshop :) ) When you know what's working on your blog, you do more of it, and you grow audience and traffic.

Oh, one hint, the word "sex" worked into titles and posts is great for drawing traffic. High bounce rate, but great for numbers, if that's all y'all are looking for ;-)

I'd also recommend y'all read Rebecca Blood's "The Weblog Handbook." It's an older book on blogging but really explains the culture that undergirds blogs and blogging.

Thanks for all the help. I think I'll aggregate them tomorrow into a "lessons" post. A couple points. Kyle, yes, I agree with you about incorporating Twitter into the blogs. We did it for the Vox Stimuli blog, which we set up to debate Obama's stimulus plan. But I think the hope was that the same Twitter functionality would extend to our other blogs. I'll follow up.

Joe, I'm with you on not getting wrapped up in numbers. Despite the fact that I wrote a book on data analytics, I think they often get in the way. The trouble is, we often don't know what to count--or count one thing (ie comments) as a proxy for another (engagement). But we can't close our eyes to numbers either, as Tish points out. They do tell us what is popular, what isn't... And yes, I'll try to get "sex" into more headlines.

BizWeek community editor Shirley Brady and I had a short chat about this post on Twitter.

It looks to me like your in-house discussion focused on increasing traffic to all existing blogs.

If that's the case, there are different metrics you could measure and many ways to do that. Several commenters above have mentioned them.

But what about rethinking content and coverage?

For example, you write it's hard for you to decide which blog to publish a post in because the differentiation is so minute. Imagine what readers miss cause they can't tell either, and randomly choose one blog over the other...

--Chrys
http://twitter.com/MacDivaONA

P.S.: I notice you use MovableType as your blogging platform. You might want to look into this hack to pull more comments into your blog:
http://mt-hacks.com/20080626-import-friendfeed-comments.html

I am relatively new to blogging (6 months, so far), so this has been a great read for me. So far, my organization and I have not decided how to measure the success of this effort. So far as I can tell, number of hits captures one dimension, as do comments.

A lot of the blogs I follow do not get a ton of comments; very few do. This does not mean they aren't successful (I am a loyal reader, after all). I am particularly pleased when someone else reacts to what I have written on their own blog, so trackbacks and incoming links should be an important part of your success metrics.

I know I stopped bothering to comment after the last design made the commenter's name static rather than a hyperlink. That's part of the give and take in conversation and community in any social forum, the ability to find out whom you're talking to and with. just my two rupees worth.

I'm really surprised that none of these comments discussed the most important metrics of 'engagement'.

It starts with Traffic right? How many people are seeing your content? Is that number growing or not. Almost all blogs generate between 65% & 95% of their traffic from first time visitors. That's a really important metric and one that can be controlled a lot more than commenting as a metric.

Clearly, after traffic comes read times. How long are people on the page reading what you have to say? Who is going to argue that a read time of a minute or more isn't 'engagement'?

The opposite of read time is bounce rate. What is your bounce rate? Is it getting better or worse? If most of your traffic comes from fist time visitors, how frequently are they bouncing.

Finally, hate to be the one to state the obvious here, but you are in the publishing business and publishing businesses run on advertising. No idea if you get paid by the impression or the click, but growing your impressions (read: traffic) is probably the only metric that matters to the people paying the bills.

Hope this helps,

Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
http://tinyurl.com/6kc684

Often a featured article on the BW's front page or in one of the sites sections will get 200 to 300 comments, while your related post on your blog may have a total of 4 to 10 comments starting from that conversation.

Both give a look at the full response to your work but it does not build out the blog. You should feel free to bring good comments to the article back to your blog and then your responses on the blog.

Now when at writer responses directly to comments on the featured article, they comment in with those 300 comments. When that response to a comment is featured off the front page, it goes to that one comment in that mix. Always give a connection from your featured articles back to the blog post.

How are you promoting your content, Steve? We've had a lot of success driving traffic to client blogs by identifying the online communities that would be interested in the specific topic, and making sure we repurpose and promote in appropriate ways.

Can be time consuming -- how many summer interns you have coming in?

OK, you got my attention on this one. How do you measure the health of your blog? There are many ways. Here's my POV for what it's worth as someone who blogs.

Traffic
Yes, it still matters. What matters more is where it comes from. Search engine traffic? Even better. It says you're content is being seen and drawing eyeballs here.

Inbound Links
This tells you something about popularity. Nearly ally popular blogs have lots of others that link to them. It's that simple.

Engagement
Time spent on your blog. as you mentioned comments are not a perfect way of measuring—but they are a sing of health. I am on minute 5 of writing you this comment. That's 5 minutes of engagement. And I'm not done yet.

Subscriptions
The amount of active subscribers is yet another indicator.

Tweets/ReTweets
Some blogs are installing Retweet functionality which tells you how many times a story has been Tweeted. That's a form of virality.

These are a few off the top of my head. There's more. The main point is that all professional media is now in competition with the amateurs. I've seen Jon Fine on Twitter and was unimpressed initially. But he's learning. It's very difficult to build up a quality following in any social space. There's a lot of noise—and not a lot of signal. Those who master the art of getting your attention, are doing something right.

Good luck.

@armano

I'd like an interview with some insights from a blogger. I cofounded a blog for baby boomers called Vaboomer, http://www.Vaboomer.com 3 years ago. Believe me, our original business plan has nothing to do with "what really happened".
The blog "led us". Examples: we never anticipated how Google would rapidly index our posts, creating permanent traffic to the blog from Google topic searches. Or how we would rely on social media (we post). I'd also like a little more images -- like the small photo oa a real blogger.

Otherwise I love Blogspotting. boo hoo don't go away.

Hmmm ... Blog comments as a metric. I guess good as any other. I lead Web 2.0 projects for a very large industrial company, and I'm having difficulty figuring our ROI measurements / metrics. As we don't do much eCommerce directly to the end consumer, it's hard to make links. We think social media is important, but proving it is another thing. Learn more via my Tweets and Blog (http://www.northstarnerd.org/)

As a former online media editor, I realize it's part of the deal for management to re-invent itself in the area of media technology. Who can blame them after getting caught asleep at the switch at newspapers and print? I, for one, like what you and Heather do here. I don't have time to comment and contribute most of the time. Yet I check in a couple times a week or more to see what you've uncovered. I learn a lot.

Keep up the GREAT WORK. P.S. Don't have time to watch videos.

I've been here from the beginning -- 2005. And I'm sorry to say I moved on. The comment moderation just made it not fun, and the weblog layout makes it heard to read older stories.

BusinessWeek should have (and maybe still can) trailblaze a model where only subscribers can leave comments. This would bring in subscribers, which is what you need.

Jon

From above "Some wondered if we should we edit hateful or racist snippets from comments. That discussion could have gone on for hours. Indeed, it continues to this minute on e-mail..."

I'll vote for the edit and removal of hateful and racist snippets from comments.

Lauren,
Good call on the BlogRoll. Totally agree - it would foster a rapidly growing community of readers and writers. IT tells me that, for now, we don't have the software capabilities. Looking forward to when we do.

I just tweeted at Stephen Baker regarding this article, but to take it old school and comment IN a blog post... enclosed are my two cents below.

In addition, I am not a fan of voting on blog comments or posting a long rant - I am too busy - and thus, that's why I love Twitter. Mr. Baker writes a blog post and tweets the link -- in less than one minute I can tweet at him directly and possibly hold a real-time conversation. That's true engagement in '09! Comments in a blog post = lame & *yawn* really boring.

@stevebaker Big fan of 'The New Entrepreneur' - J. Tozzi does a great job - always peaks my interest. Felt more comfortable commenting here.

@stevebaker Also, commenting on a blog seems old to me now - why comment when I have direct access (for better or worse) on Twitter?

My tweet: Counting blog comments best way to measure engagement? What do you think? http://bwbx.io/VJAI (via @stevenbaker) Do u account for Twitter?

Kristina, to drive home your point, I had already read your comments on Twitter, and even RTed one of them, before I saw this comment on the blog. (RT @KristinaWeise Also, commenting on a blog seems old to me now - why comment when I have direct access (for better or worse) on Twitter?)

I think you're right. Twitter is a much quicker and direct way to respond. Even to respond to your comment on this page, I've had to go to the blog, write, and then go to the admin page, OK it, and then wait 15 or 20 minutes for it to show up... This means that what might have passed for an interactive and engaging medium four years ago is out of date.

Greg, as far as the blogroll goes... I'm not crazy about them. It tends to endorse some people and, inevitably, leave other people out. And the way I see it, even blogs I admire can be full of crap a certain % of the time--as is this one. And otherwise horrible blogs every once in a while post something great. So where do you draw the line?

Blogrolls are tough, and I think most sites tend to go overboard - either because they don't want to leave anyone out or they want links in return. I doubt readers are ever looking to get 30 recommendations (I'm not).

I agree that many blogs are sporadic, which lends itself to a natural cap on roll length. Another way to do it, I think, is to have a short, permanent roll of Teflon blogs and then a cycle of new ones that relate to the author's most recent post.