metrics – Climb to the Stars

Measuring a Blog's Success: Visitors and Comments Don't Cut It [en]

[fr] Un blog, c'est un investissement à long terme. Six mois, un an au moins sans se poser de questions, avant d'essayer de voir si "ça marche" ou pas. Et ne mesurez pas son succès aux visiteurs et aux commentaires. Plutôt, trouvez un moyen plus qualitatif de mesurer les bénéfices que vous en retirez, en vous basant sur la raison pour laquelle vous tenez ce blog.

Interestingly, a large part of my work right now seems to revolved around blogging. I’m happy about that. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now, and went I became self-employed mid-2006 the first “title” I used was “blogging consultant”. Because back then, it was about blogs (and maybe wikis, and maybe social software, but not “social media”).

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to point out is that if you start a blog, or your company starts a blog, it’s important to have realistic expectations about the kind of benefits you’ll reap, and when, and how to measure them.

Even in 2011, too many people imagine that if you’re doing a good job with your blog, it will translate into thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments within a few weeks.

No way.

Those blogs with thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments are edge-cases, and have probably been at it for longer than you have.

Blogs and comments are actually not a good way of measuring the success of a blog. Honestly, if your blog has a few hundred readers a day and you get a comment now and again, you’re doing fine.

To measure the success of your blog, you need to think back to the reason you’re doing it. What do you want to get out of it? Chances are that “having as many people as possible visit it” is not the reason you’re doing it.

Maybe you want to change the perception people have of you. Maybe you want to showcase certain things you’re doing. Maybe you want to attract a certain type of person — reader, writer, or contributor. Maybe it’s the “marketing budget” for your business. Maybe you want to share a passion. Maybe you want an outlet to express yourself.

There are many reasons to want a blog. And most of them are perfectly valid (one that’s not, most of the time: make money with it).

But don’t go around measuring readers and comments to judge your success just because they’re convenient numbers.

Maybe what you need to do is create a scrapbook of all the things people spontaneously say about your blog, online or off. Maybe you need to make a list of events or situations where your blog was an ice-breaker or opened doors for you.

That seems to make way more sense than counting visits and comments. I mean, if those are so important to make somebody happy, they can be gamed.

Blogging takes time. It takes time because it takes time to think, write, link, tag, categorize, illustrate, title, proof, and publish. It takes time to be creative, and if your ambition for your blog is to be more than a collection of breaking news, hot topics and catchy headlines, blogging is a creative job.

But blogging also takes time because it’s a long-term strategy. When blogging started being hot, there were these numbers flying around, telling us that the average blog on the web was 3 months old and had 3 articles (or something like that). People started blogging, and abandoned their blogs very quickly.

When starting a blog, I wouldn’t worry about if it’s working or not before at least six months or a year. People are in such a hurry nowadays. All this hype about real-time, the internet being a place of unprecedented speed, the acceleration of innovation, not to say the “overnight successes” we keep hearing about but which languished in obscurity for ages before coming to the light. And even if there are real “overnight sensations”, they are, as I said above, edge cases.

And your blog will not be an edge case.

Your blog can work fine and do its job, but it will not be an edge case.

Unless your blog is your product — and in this case you’re clearly in the media business, and not using your blog as a communication tool — it is not to be looked at as a service or product people are going to use everyday and flock to. Instead, it’s a collection of valuable, long-lasting, well-indexed information. It’s the expression of something. It colours who you are.

And that takes time — not just the time of labour, but the days and months flying by in the calendar, so that value can accumulate, and become valuable.

Let me sum up this long rambling post in a few points:

blogging is a long-term strategy: it will take many months or even years for you to see what benefits it’s actually bringing you
don’t obsess on visitors and comments; instead, focus on what is said about your blog, and the opportunities it brings, in terms of contacts, open doors, favorable dispositions (qualitative measurement rather than quantitative)

On The Media: Hyperlocal and Numbers [en]

[fr] Trois sujets à écouter sur On The Media: un sur le journalisme hyperlocal (qui me fait penser au Bondy Blog -- d'ailleurs, pourquoi a-t-on le Lausanne Bondy Blog et non le Renens Bondy Blog? mystère...), et deux sur l'abus de chiffres dans les médias et le chiffre magique 50'000.

I’ve started catching up with my On The Media backlog. Here are two pieces I suggest you listen to.

Is Hyperlocal the Future of News?

This reminds me of Bondy Blog. Started by a bunch of Swiss journalists covering civil unrest around Paris in 2005 from the Paris suburbs themselves, it has since then been handed over to young local reporters. Bondy Blogs have sprouted since then in various cities, including Lausanne and Vernier — though I remain convinced that the Lausanne Bondy Blog should be the Lausanne Bondy Blog at all, but the Renens Bondy Blog. Isn’t it about putting the local spotlight on the underpriviledged suburbs?

Are Bondy Blogs hyperlocal?

Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts followed by Prime Number

You probably know my distaste for numbers and our obsession with metrics (including in the media, which is the topic of these two pieces). Refresher: my rant about un-scientific Twitter metrics, fan-quoting Seth Godin, and Suw‘s heartily recommended “Metrics” series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. (I’m not dead against analytics, though. Just cautious.)

Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict is a book, and it’s now in my Amazon shopping basket.

Enjoy!

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

: Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now, because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

La course aux chiffres [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Quand j’ai commencé à écrire sur internet, en 1999, ce n’était pas avec un quelconque objectif de rentabilité en tête. J’aimais écrire, je désirais partager idées et trouvailles avec autrui.

Quand mon site web a pris la voie du blog, un an plus tard, c’était toujours dans le même état d’esprit. Et au fond, aujourd’hui, dix ans de vie et de mots plus tard, c’est encore le cas. J’écris parce que j’aime écrire, j’aime réfléchir, j’aime le contact et les échanges avec les autres. Mon métier à rejoint de façon assez directe ces intérêts depuis quelques années, mais ce n’est finalement qu’une évolution de surface dans mon parcours.

Les blogueurs qui occupent aujourd’hui le devant de la scène sont en grande partie obsédés par l’optimisation de leur blog. Titres efficaces, longueur d’article optimale, le tout assaisonné de mots-clés et de boutons “sociaux” pour favoriser l’arrivée de lecteurs via les moteurs de recherche et la diffusion de l’article à travers les réseaux sociaux.

Ce qui compte aujourd’hui c’est le nombre d’abonnés, d’amis sur facebook, de followers sur Twitter, de commentaires sur chaque article. Cette volonté de voir nos activités et notre succès reflété par des chiffres n’est pas nouvelle (nombre de visites sur un site, ça ne date pas d’hier) — mais je suis toujours attristée de voir à quel point cette course aux chiffres finit par pervertir (au sens premier) notre utilisation des outils dont il est question.

Dès qu’on mesure quelque chose, on change notre comportement pour tenter d’influer sur les chiffres. Du coup, les chiffres perdent une bonne partie de leur sens.

Le phénomène n’est pas nouveau, il n’y a qu’à regarder la course à l’audience dans les médias traditionnels.

Un exemple très simple à comprendre est celui de nombre de commentaires sur un article de blog. Certes, un article intéressant qui génère des réactions est une bonne chose. Mais si on décide que le succès de notre blog sera mesuré par le nombre de commentaires sur chaque article, qu’est-ce qui se passe? On commence à écrire des articles qui ont pour but de provoquer des réactions.

Plus on a de followers sur Twitter, mieux c’est? On se met à suivre tout et n’importe qui dans l’espoir d’être suivis en retour. On distribue des bonbons à ceux qui nous suivent. On utilise des stratégies ayant pour but de gonfler nos chiffres. Mais la valeur de ce qu’on fait sur Twitter a-t-elle augmenté pour autant? Et est-ce que la valeur qu’on en retire est vraiment un facteur direct de ces chiffres que l’on peut manipuler artificiellement?

Twitter Metrics: Let's Remain Scientific, Please! [en]

[fr] On ne peut pas prendre deux mesures au hasard, en faire un rapport, et espérer qu'il ait un sens. Un peu de rigueur scientifique, que diable!

10.02.2011: Seesmic recently took its video service down. I have the videos but need to put them back online. Thanks for your patience.

Video post prompted by [Louis Gray’s Twitter Noise Ratio](http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/04/whats-your-twitter-noise-ratio.html). I’m still [somewhat handicapped](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/04/24/the-neighbours-cat-won/) and [used up my typing quota this morning](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/04/27/diigo-i-think-i-like-the-idea-bonus-content-conversation-fragmentation/). corrections: measure time, measure **distance** (not “speed”) My graphs: Zoom in to the beginning of the graph: Attempt to spot trends: Not conclusive. See also: [Stowe’s Twitterized Conversational Index](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/03/scoble-on-the-s.html) — interestingly, Stowe became much more “chatty” on Twitter lately 😉 **Update: The Problem With Metrics** — a few thoughts on what metrics do to the way we behave with our tools. Confusing ends and means.

Tag: metrics

On The Media: Hyperlocal and Numbers [en]

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