Charlene Li blogs about whether blogging’s worth it

Charlene Li, one of our favorite bloggers from Forrester Research, has posted about her recently-released Forrester Research report “The ROI of Blogging,” which she wrote with colleague, Chloe Stromberg.

The value of blogging to a brand has been one of those open questions ever since businesses and entrepreneurs began to put the form to use for marketing, PR and customer relations purposes. But should businesses bother to blog? Note Li and Stromberg:

While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

Just how valuable can blogging be to a business? Is it worth the investment? Li and Stromberg say “yes.”

Among the corporate blogs that Li and Stromberg studied was General Motors’ FastLane Blog, the goal of which is “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers.” A key metric, they say, is comments (which not all corporate blogs allow):

FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila—there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white.

Although she admits their findings are somewhat subjective, Li believes that they have found “a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.”

We think blogging is definitely worth it, albeit with a few caveats.  Blogging represents a different kind of communication between businesses and their audiences—prospects, customers, the press and other interested parties—than traditional channels such as press releases or advertising. It requires a very different attitude, voice and tone in a networked community where the conversation is often two-way (and sometimes multi-way). A blog that sounds too much like a press release or looks like just another marketing vehicle is bound to fail. Striking a balance between getting your message across while serving the needs of your users and building community is critical.

For more, check out these posts on Charlene’s blog:

• New ROI of blogging report from Forrester
• Calculating the ROI of blogging
• Calculating the ROI of blogs – it’s not about the math

—Micheal Mattis, Blog Editor