Blog Audience Measurement: Don’t forget the “Who” question!

I was invited as a panelist at the Blog Business Summit from Maryam, but my current schedule is just too busy, I can tell that I missed a great event.

For starters, the relevant conversation of Blog Audience Measurement at the Blog Business Summit with Tris and Andru is exactly the conversation I need to get involved with. Check out Joe’s breakdown from the discussion, he brings forth some of the tactics discussed.

We know that we can measure some parts of blogs, read my thoughts on Signs of a Healthy Blog: Resonation: 1) Analytics 2) Trackbacks 3) Comments 4) Benchmark changes 5) Qualitative evaluation.

Just yesterday, I had a conversation with some Silicon Valley Marketing Managers around Social Media and using in a Community Marketing Strategy. I gave examples of what different companies are doing, how the tools have been used, and provided strategic assistance and tactical examples of the specific strengths and weaknesses of each tool. They get it, understand the concepts and are ready to deploy

The one questions that I could not ask was: WHO is reading blogs, WHO is listening to podcasts, and WHO is in Secondlife.

While we can all agree that it may likely skew towards early adopters or tech savvy folks, (awareness and tool barriers may keep it like that) we don’t know their demographic information. How old are they, where do they work, what do they do, etc.

Other than putting up a survey (like Guy Kawasaki did for his advertiser Federated Media) would it be even feasible or even accurate to apply this to other consumers bloggers, podcasts, Secondlife?

As an industry, and as a Community Manager myself, we’ll need to answer the “Who” question.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 2:55 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media, Voice of the Customer, Web Strategy, Web Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.