In a prior post I expressed one different way to look at the ROI of blogging by not measuring blogging ROI directly but directly measuring the alternative as a proxy (in some sense).
Now Jeffrey Hill has been conducting a great series of interviews on the use of blogs in business. In his post he interviews Christine
Halvorson, Chief Blogger at Stonyfield Farm (where she oversees from four to five blogs). When asked by Mr. Hill about the costs of blogging, the dialogue went as follows:
CH Exactly. Our biggest expense is me.
JH Are the blogs particularly expensive to run?
CH Absolutely
not. We have hardly spent any money. We bought the software, hired a
contract designer once or twice for a couple of hundred dollars worth
of work, but it’s really minimal.
So as Jeff Nolan pointed out recently, at some point weblogs might be viewed as just of cost of playing the game – they might follow the historical path of the website (where initially no one thought they needed them but now they are widely dispersed).
True. True. Some companies may also take things further though to look at the lifetime value of a customer. Carl Sewell (I’m not sure if he is a blogger) built from the ground up the largest luxury car dealer in the United States (I might add that Sewell is located in Dallas). Probably over $1 billion in revenue. The company is based on SERVICE. Mr. Sewell once said something to the effect (don’t quote me on the exact numbers) that he viewed people looking to by cars as the $366,000 customer. That is over the lifetime of a relationship with Sewell the company could expect that customer to buy more cars and spend $366,000 over the customer’s lifetime. When you take that orientation with your audience and prospects, it makes you look at the relationship angle much differently than just selling one car.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group
Hi Steve, do you have any opinions on the way that HP has organized their corporate blogs?
http://www.hp.com/blogs
I tend to look at these types of questions by putting it back on the company to see whether what they are doing is *consistent* with what they would like to achieve. Now I have not followed HP that closely, but as I understand things, HP wants to:
1) compete with IBM in premium computers and services, Dell in business and consumer systems, and
2) experiment with blogs
Aside from whether the blog strategy is consistent with the overall company strategy, I should note that my response here is not to evaluate the overall company strategy.
In any case, if HP pursuing #1 and trying to line up their blog with this strategy, I would expect to see more communication in the area of talking about the pros and cons of where they are (perhaps also including feedback mechanisms – that said, feedback is most important for the customer set they are selling to – could be more the channel than the end-user – I’d have to dig further to understand their business).
If they are pursuing #2, then it would be interesting to see what kind of things they have learned from their blogging experiments. Quantitative and qualitative measures are key, and preferrably they would internally have some knowledge sharing process. As an outsider, I cannot assess how good their internal metrics are. That said, for the technical blogs that I briefly scanned through, there did not appear to be very many posts relative to what I have seen in other technical blog forums. While determining what best-of-breed is may be hard in the early use of corporate blogs, trying to constantly benchmark against other companies will be something to look at.
My off-the-cuff $0.02.
I’ve added your blog to the alumni section of my MBA blog directory.