by Ethan Johnson
April 3, 2006

I won't get into the whole he-said, he-said link-a-thon here, but in short, the latest flap in Blog-land concerns measuring the ROI of corporate blogging. Now is as good a time as any to repeat my trusty adage:

Corporations generally don't engage in activities that cannot be tied to revenue.

It's not 100% true, but generally speaking, that's the fact, Jack.

Small wonder, then, that there are corporate types who are casting aspersions on blogging for blogging's sake. Someone retorted that if blogging ROI can/should be measured, then explain what the ROI of a handshake is.

Here's my take on all of this, besides my adage mentioned above.

I think what is being asked for, poorly, is evidence that the claims of the pro-blogging (which is to say, they are "for" blogging) community will actually produce the positive benefits that they are espousing. Not everything is about money, so a financial ROI case may not always be made. But think of the question this way: What is the ROI of fire? Well, it warms you up on a cold day. It cooks your food. It can be used to temper steel.

While beneficial, fire does not always bring about a positive ROI after taking the trouble to create one. Fires can burn down your house, burn you, and provide more heat on an already 100-degree day.

So it goes with blogging in any capacity. Yes, there are benefits. But there are also liabilities. The pro-blogger crowd tends to emphasize the perceived positives while either downplaying or downright ignoring the negatives. The question that people are asking when they ask for a quantifiable ROI forecast is, how do you know?

Let's return to the counterpoint of measuring the ROI of a handshake. The short answer is, it depends on who is shaking hands, and for what purpose, as well as the credibility/authenticity of both parties. If A and B shake hands as a verbal agreement, and A has no intention of holding up his or her end of the bargain, that's not positive ROI. But it may be argued that shaking hands with everyone will yield a higher ROI (in life terms, if not business) than it would to slap everyone in the face that you meet. To know this, however, you would need to shake hands with half of the people you meet, then slap the faces of the other half and determine which approach yielded better results. Obviously, such an experiment is not necessary to know which was the better option. However, shaking hands does not automatically confer a positive ROI from that experience.

A process-intensive fellow that I know framed such things to me this way: Suppose you want to sell your home. You decide to fly a banner over your home that says "for sale". The question is, did this drive interest in buying your home? How do you know?

Put another way, General Motors has a blog. For whatever reason, they have kept it up for about a year. However, I am skeptical that people are buying GM vehicles specifically because GM has a blog. I suspect (without evidence) that GM might maintain a blog because they heard that the conventional wisdom was pro-blog. It's not a big deal to crank out a blog post here and there, but the question is, how do they know that the blog is having any sort of positive impact on their business?

I was tempted to go to a GM dealership and ask potential customers if they were aware that GM maintained a weblog, and how that fact might affect their buying decision. I may still do this sometime, assuming I don't get booted off of the lot, or worse.

Finally, I have a sneaking suspicion that the pro-blogging crowd is urging wider adoption of blogging at all costs because this serves as a sort of security blanket. I was thinking that if someone enjoys cramming hunks of spam down their pants, they want some sort of assurance that they're not the only one doing it. The security blanket reveals itself in statements like "well, [Fortune 500 company name here] enjoys stuffing spam down their pants too."

Of course, if positive benefits are had from blogging, I say "go for it." But as with anything, I think it is fair to counter claims of positive (or negative) benefits by asking "how do you know?" The answer to that question is often quite telling. <EM>