Rules of Engagement
Some interesting discussion over the last couple of days about the necessity for a new kind of metric for measuring the effectiveness of blogs. Robert Scoble talks about the difference between getting page impressions (bad) and engagement (good):
There’s another stat out there called “engagement.†No one is measuring it that I know of.
What do I mean?
Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.
It kind of ties in with the recent talk about which are the most influential blogs, and the lists published by Edelman/Technorati of the top 50 bloggers in various countries, according to inbound links. The rankings have proven quite controversial, and I’ve seen a number of alternative lists (those three are for the UK alone). What exactly should we be measuring?
Traditional metrics, page views and users, would appear to do a poor job of showing either how engaged the audience is or how influential the writer is.
Inbound links seem to be a slightly better measure, though the flaws in that system are that (a) it only counts fellow bloggers, not general readers; (b) the most established bloggers, the A-list cartel, if you like, are accused of only ever linking to each other; (c) you might link to someone because you think they are wrong - it’s a good way to manufacture a story from thin air; and (d) it favours mainstream blogs over specialists.
Another stance you might take is that the number of comments on a blog give a good indication of influence and engagement. I quite like this. Obviously people are engaged if they get off their backsides and participate, aren’t they? Then I thought of a couple of problems. It would seem to favour controversialists over what the majority thinks, yet that doesn’t really mean they have a lot of influence; it just means they get people’s backs up. It is also affected by the style of writing - I would assume that someone who asks questions on their blog gets more responses than those who make statements.
Scoble continues, illustrating why a small, engaged audience might be a lot more important than a large, disengaged one. He also inadvertently suggests another possible measurement of this key property:
Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.
My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.
That kind of suggests to me that there’s more fairness to the system than might initially appear. If response rates are higher when the call to action comes from an engaging blog, then ultimately, those engaging writers will be more successful.
Right. Can I have some money, please?
