One of the coolest things about business blogging is the social interaction and community that is built when readers leave meaningful comments. Like a good story, a post elicits a response from the reader. As your community develops, the value of your brand increases. But this warm and fuzzy feeling that people get about your brand as they interact with you on your blog can be hard to measure and quantify. That’s where blog interaction metrics come in.

Building a blog to one or more interaction metrics can help you focus on what’s important - brand engagement.

Do you measure a successful post by the number of readers, bookmarks added to del.ic.ious, diggs, comments, number or quality of backlinks, or a combination of all the above? Some metrics have a place in your blog marketing scorecard, like number of comments. And some do not, like number of trackbacks (unless you like counting spammers — and that you could do all day!). Because the last thing you need is just more data for the sake of data.

Avinash Kaushik came up with some really nifty blog success metrics that really resonate with me. I bet they’ll resonate with you too. They are:

• Raw author contribution (posts per month and words per post)
• Audience growth (onsite & offsite, visitors and unique visitors)
• “Conversion” rate (comments per post)
• Citations (blog inlinks, Technorati rank)
• Ripple Index (# of unique blogs linking to your blog)
• Cost (time, hardware/software technology, opportunity cost
• Benefit / ROI (comparative vs. direct vs. “non-traditional” vs. unquantifiable)

As you start measuring the above and then gauging the success of what you’re doing on your blog based on these metrics, you can tie your activities back to something more meaningful than just the “hits” you’re generating.

If you want to learn more about metrics, I encourage you to watch the archived recording of a “Website Metrics and ROI” webinar that Avinash and I presented last year. No registration required. Just click and watch (or download). It’s 100 minutes of the two of us talking about our favorite metrics — not just for blogging, but also email marketing, web marketing, search marketing, and more. And if you just want to scan over our Powerpoint slides before you invest 100 minutes of your time (and I don’t blame you — time is precious!), here’s the PPT file. Enjoy!

What blog metrics do you value most? How do your readers interact with you? Do you have any particular reporting tools you recommend? Your interactivity is welcome and invited.

Earlier this year, I put out a call on this site as to how many of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging. I guessed "somewhere in the 3-6% range currently." Yesterday I got an email from Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, saying that he had wondered the same thing over dinner with Doc Searls. More specifically, they wondered whether companies that were thriving did not blog because they had less to gain from such openness while companies fighting to grow or regain market share were more inclined to blog, and whether this was a trend that could be correlated to companies’ business performance. So, Anderson set some Wired interns to the task and came up with this post describing what they found. Further, together with Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, they created the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to keep track of the trend. (I’m gratified to note that my original estimate seems to be holding true: the collaborative effort has identified public blogs at 4% of the Fortune 500 firms.)

I’ve been head over heels about wikis for a while now. But, for most of us, they’ve been less than useful partially because they’re still too "geeky." At least, they have been for me. Well, those days are over. 37Signals, the company that brought you Basecamp, has rolled out Writeboard, a truly easy-to-use wiki.

I won’t go into detail here, but I do invite you to read my glowing review of the app on my blog. Trust me, you’ll like Writeboard. Like the rest of 37Signal’s products it’s an easy-to-use software application that really works. 

B.L. Ochman writes about this new project:

It’s 28 people who blog about PR all getting together next week to blog about making blogs part of the marketing mix. Being PR people, they’ve turned it into a big academic thing for the most part. I am sticking to practical stuff, examples only, no theory, as is my wont.
:>)

The New PR Wiki is an accompanying wiki.

Link

Todd S. has taken another approach to a directory on business blogs (which, in some sense, my site already is): he has created an alphabetized wiki. (”What’s a wiki?” you ask? It’s basically a blog that any reader can edit or contribute to. Here’s another definition, or just check out Todd’s site and you’ll get the idea.)

Definitely a different animal than my site, as all entries here have my subjective spin, plus categorization, while the BizBlogDirectory features descriptions by the site managers. My guess is it will get big fast. Something certainly to keep an eye on, and also a good place to register your blog, if you haven’t done so already.

Link