Engagement, Conversation, Measure
Scott Karp jumps into the Scoble/Sessum inspired discussion and adds his two cents:
Scoble is right that we DESPERATELY need some new media metrics. New Media folks may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like “conversation,” but they’re actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media — like how to prove the value.
Hmmm. Measuring value is problematic because it is not a constant, like clicks, or RSS subscriptions. Is some blog more valuable -- in some generalized market sense -- if a thousand truck drivers read it, or if one hundred CEOs read it? Depends on your perspective: if you are an advertiser trying to sell oil additives, the former, but if you are the Harvard Business Review, the latter.
I don't believe that there is an objective metric for value, but trying to measure how engaged a community is might be extremely useful. That's one of the reasons behind the Conversational Index that I proposed early in 2006. The CI is a measure of the amount of conversation going on at a blog. The CI is defined as (the number of comments + the number of trackbacks)/the number of posts. I pointed out when I proposed it that this is an indicator of future blog success: all successful blogs in my experience, had a high degree of conversation going on.
To some extent, Technorati rankings indicate the impact of a blog, since links represent "votes" about that blogs impact. But as we all know, people make links to blogs that they violently disagree with, but the links count as votes anyway.
In the world of video blogging, downloads may be an indicator, too.
But none of these has the authority that Neilsen ratings have had in the world of television. Looks like it would be a good opportunity for Nielsen or its competitors to create some industry-accepted metric, based on a combination of these sorts of factors: total readers, by demographic, how much they read, how long they stay, do they subscribe, do they read the RSS, how often do they click through, etc.
In the meantime, I believe that beauty is still in the eye of the beholder: value is contextual. A blog that is focused on a specialized industry that reaches a fair number of the influencers in that industry will have a demonstrable value, even if overall readership is less than prosumer-oriented gadget blogs. But that value will be skewed toward those competing in the industry, not Lexus or CBS.
What a smart post! Just thinking about your metrics suggestion of measuring the extent of conversation stimulated by a blog post...it would seem that some form of social network analysis could enable a ratings firm like Nielsen to rank the degree of influence of individual nodes. The quantity and amplitude of high-influence nodes (i.e., nodes that are more frequently and strongly connected to other nodes, often represented graphically by the size of the node) taken together with the quantity of conversation generated could be a powerful measure of the value of a blog post to an organization like Harvard Business School, McKenzie or even a publication like The Atlantic.
Posted by: Alan Morrison | October 26, 2006 at 10:14 PM