I'm very happy to introduce my first guest writer on "World of Corporate Blogging"!
Fredrik Wass lives in Stockholm and is Web editor at one of the largest law firms in Sweden with nine offices in five countries. He is responsible for the development of the firm´s intranet and external web page. Together with his work Fredrik emphasis on networking, finding interesting opportunities in the blogging community. He has a B.Sc. in Media and communiation with courses in media production, copywriting and strategic information (PR). He has practioned as Public Relations officer in earlier employments.


How do you measure the impact of a Corporate Blog?
There are different ways of measuring the effect of a newspaper ad, TV-commercial or PR activity with traditional methods. But how do one measure and check the quality of a Corporate blog from a marketing point of view? There´s always the good old traffic statistics which is becoming more and more refined, but as Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion says, it doesn´t give us the whole truth.

"You can look at traffic statistics, but they shouldn't be used to indicate the blog's health. [Traffic volume] is a nice boxcar number, but it doesn't mean anything. You may have 100 media hits, but what if they're all negative?" (Steve Rubel)

Zachary Rodgers at Clickz.com has spoken to a number of blog experts about this subject and he believes that mixing the traditional instruments of evaluation for web pages (pop-up-surveys, interviews with visitors) together with already existing tools from the blog community; comments, trackbacks and listings, is the solution. According to Steve Rubel another method to measure your Corporate blog is to evaluate the search engine results on your company name before and after any PR activity or campaign. You will then be able to measure how your brand is being discussed and how your strategic communication efforts gets reflected, almost as the way you measure press attention before and after any PR activity.

Bob Cargill, senior creative director at Yellowfin Direct Marketing thinks it´s easier to measure the impact of a Corporate blog than the usual advertising and PR campaigns. You get direct feedback on your contributions and are able to communicate directly with your readers. Through trackbacks and comments one can easily analyse the posts that generates traffic and the effect the content has. A rare opportunity in traditional marketing.


Fredrik Wass/http://bisonblog.blogs.com/