The most obvious answer is that you are ultimately trying to influence some behavior or attitude. You want your readers to buy, register, understand, donate, attend, etc.  But there are many other tangible benefits of business blogging that might be more difficult to measure … but no less important. Here are 25 non-financial benefits of business blogging:

1. Create a database of answers — Blog about customer questions. Use links to those posts to save time and answer future questions.
2. Reward employees — Shine a spotlight on brilliant employees by featuring their ideas and accomplishments on your blog.
3. Marketing integration — Turn content from your blog into sales and marketing materials.
4. SEO — Having an active, relevant blog can have a powerful impact on search engine ranking.
5. Point of differentiation — If your competitors don’t blog, is this an opportunity to stand out in your niche?
6. Solidify POV — The act of blogging forces you to be clear on your company’s position on issues.
7. Re-purpose the content — Your blog content can be cost-effectively re-purposed for newsletters, eBooks and other publications.
8. Humanize your brand — There is probably no more powerful and cost-effective way to show the “soft” side of your business than storytelling through a blog.
9. Sign of activity — A current blog confirms that your website is updated and relevant.
10. PR — Tweets and Facebook status updates probably aren’t going to attract the attention of reporters. Helpful blog posts will.
11. Internal communications — Don’t forget about the impact blogs have on your internal audience.
12. Customer engagement — Creating a dialogue with your customers can lead to powerful business benefits. Why not have customers contribute posts?
13. Solve problems — Some companies like Caterpillar are using blogs to crowd-source technical problem solving.
14. New product development ideas — A hot trend is using the blog platform to deliver new product and service ideas.
15. Voice of authority — Is your company the industry leader? What better way to demonstrate that than a voice of leadership on your blog?
16. Market segmentation — Many companies (especially in high tech) have multiple blogs to reach customers by different interest, demographic or geography.
17. Identify advocates — Blog readers may be among your brand’s most powerful fans.
18. Constant customer connection — Calling on customers is expensive. But a blog post can be a little “sales call” every week.
19. Test ideas — Need to take a position?  Why not test it with the blog community first?
20. Assemble chapters for a book — Many companies piece together blog posts to create larger publications.
21. Research — Throw a question out there and use your blog as a cost-effective and rapid way to get feedback.
22. Networking – Blog connections have led to finding interns, suppliers and partners for my business.
23. Establish emotional connection — Blogging’s ability to connect through a story is powerful — especially for non-profits.
24. Social Proof — Simply having a blog sends a message that your company “gets” social media.
25. Crisis management – If you have a blog, you don’t have to rely on the press to get the story straight.  Your blog can put the facts out there.

Is this list complete? What other benefits are you realizing from your blog?

This is Kate.

She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers.  But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over 10 million page views!  How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months?  Pinterest!

Pinterest is the hottest social media platform around right now. Created in March 2010, it’s still only available by signing up for a waiting list. Pinterest is probably best described as a “virtual pinboard.” Based on the idea that many people have magazine clippings of their dream vacations, weight loss goals, or perfect weddings, Pinterest allows users to create “boards” and share content by uploading images, “pin” from other sites, or “re-pin” from other user boards.

And there is an important social element too as you can comment, like, share, email content, and search based off of your customized interests.

If you snoop around Pinterest, for a little while, chances are you’ll run into a high-quality image of a beautifully coiffed hairstyle from Kate.  “My whole goal behind the blog was to share my ideas and information,” she said, “so I thought Pinterest would be a great way to share video tutorials of my hairstyles.”

“I pinned a photo of a completed style, which directed Pinterest users back to my blog to watch the tutorial video. And then I sat back and watched as the numbers rolled in.  I was stunned as I watched my blog quickly approach the first 100,000 page views! My husband and I sat at the computer, hitting refresh over and over until it hit 100,001. We were amazed.”   Since then, Kate’s success with Pinterest has continued to skyrocket. Thanks to Pinterest, Kate has now gained 16,000 blog subscribers and 14,000 Pinterest followers in just a few months.

“Almost daily I get a comment or email saying ‘I found you on Pinterest!’,” she said. “My top 10 traffic referring URLs are all Pinterest.”

Kate believes her success comes down to a careful balance between her original content and self-promotion for her blog and business.

“I think there is a fine line between self-promotion and obnoxious self-promotion. I decided to only pin hair photos to my own boards [from her blog], and a maximum of two per week.  The rest of the week, if any blog readers want to pin things from my blog, it’s up to them.”

“What I don’t want is for my 14,000 Pinterest followers to log on to Pinterest and see all the photos from my blog. I think that would be obnoxious,” she continued.  “I had one instance where I was following a blogger on Pinterest and she would pin things from her posts multiple times a day. I stopped following her.”

Beyond the blog numbers, Kate is also obtaining new business due to her Pinterest success.  In September, she took on her first blog sponsor. She also has had interest in her private hairstyling business. “It’s brought so many people to my blog who now want to be my clients!”

One of the reasons for Kate’s Pinterest success is that her hairstyling photos create intrigue.  If you pin an image of a dog, you know it is a dog. But with a hairstyle, a recipe, or a DIY project, there is a backstory.  You need to keep digging if you want to know how to do it. That “intrigue” is an opportunity to drive people back to your blog or website.

How about you?  Do you have an opportunity to create intrigue for your blog or business through Pinterest?

Lauren Schaefer is a recent college grad, NYC resident, and nonprofit event planner with an interest in all things social media. She documents her new journey as a young professional at her blog From the Fifth Floor. Twitter: @leschaef

By Srininvas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist

A while back I said that metrics and measurements have a tendency to limit our potential. What I failed to realize was that this is only the case when we measure the wrong things.  As bloggers it’s really easy to get caught up in comparison and competition. As a result we end up measuring the things that don’t have a strong impact on our business.

3 Metrics That Don’t Really Matter Much

1. Traffic 

A few weeks back I had a post that went viral on Stumbleupon. It sent  over 160,000 visits to my blog in a week. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that all traffic is not equal and traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to revenue.  Do you need traffic? Absolutely.  But if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that quality trumps quantity . You don’t need 100,000 visitors, just a tribe who actually cares.

2. Tweets, Likes, Fans and Followers

Marcus Sheridan wrote an interesting post the other day, which I thought was really reflective of this.  The posts that have made him the most money from his pool business are not necessarily the most popular.  Just because a post is popular on social media it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valuable for your customers or your business.

3. Comments

Talk to Dan Andrews and you’ll realize that the people who comment on your blog are not an accurate representation of your readers. The people who comment on your blog are usually other bloggers, and there is a “silent majority” who read everything you write, but don’t comment.  While it’s nice to have  comments on your posts, it’s not as important  as you might think.

Metrics that Matter

1. Email Subscribers

There’s not one person who is successful that won’t tell you that your email list is what generates your money. A few months back I made a very conscious decision to focus on this group of readers, and interestingly enough I have a much deeper connection with my readers. My traffic is higher than ever before, and my blog is growing faster than ever before.  This is your “silent majority” and this is who you need to cater to.

2. Conversion Rates

Many people get caught up in writing guests posts at the most popular blogs. Other than bragging rights  a post on a really popular blog might not do much for you. On the flip side a popular personal development blog that I write for sends me anywhere between 50-60 new subscribers per guest post. The key is of course to write great content and use a well written custom landing page.

3. Open Rates 

It’s nice to have a list, but if nobody is opening your emails than it doesn’t matter. A list of 50 people who talk to you is better than a list of 5000 who ignore you. I recently decided to clean house on my email list and deleted almost 350 people from the list because they hadn’t opened any of my emails in the last 4 months. Don’t be afraid to let some of your subscribers go.

4. Revenue

If you’re in this to make money, then this is the only metric that ultimately matters.  When I recently spoke to a business coach she told me something really interesting. There are people who make plenty of money online that you’ve never heard of.  Do you actually measure the revenue you generate? Even if it’s $100  make a point to measure it.

Measuring all the wrong metrics can make it really difficult to turn social media attention into income.  Unfortunately many early stage bloggers get caught up in the trap of all these metrics. What’s been your experience with this?

Srinivas Rao is the author of the The Skool of Life and, the host-co-founder of BlogcastFM. 

There were some outstanding blog posts last week that explored the idea of the SPEED of social media communication changing traditional business models. This was social dialogue at its best.

Jay Baer started the conversation with a series of posts that included Why Social Media has Ruined Your Advantage.  He postulates that the social channel is unique in that businesses are using the same playbook that consumers are using in their daily lives. This rapidly breaks down barriers and eliminates the shroud of mystery that businesses have used as an advantage for centuries.

In my own writing, I’ve characterized this barrier as an “ether” in the marketplace that has kept customers asleep.  Many banks are profitable from fees and charges that customers overlook or don’t understand. AOL still receives income from dial-up subscriptions people forgot they have on their credit cards, or don’t understand they don’t need any more. The transparency of the web will dissipate this ether over time.

Tom Webster continued the conversation in his post Be Careful What You Wish For.  He wonders if the social web challenges tried and true business models and raises an unrealistic expectation of customer service.

These posts helped coalesce some of my thinking on a topic I have been pondering – Everybody is rushing to join the social media conversation.  But at what cost?

The cost of dissatisfaction

Years ago, I led an effort to re-engineer a customer service model for my company.  I used an academic study from the University of Michigan as my guide (can’t find it now) that stated there is a diminishing return to satisfying ALL customers.  More or less, once you get over 98% customer satisfaction, the cost of satisfying that final 2 percent is not economical. So, achieving 100 percent customer satisfaction is impractical for many businesses.

I see this playing out on the web every day.  There is a core group of haters who will bellyache no matter what you do or say to appease them.  When we had the “ether,” we could afford to ignore them. But now their comments are public on company Facebook pages and other social platforms.   A few vocal haters can be thunderous, hijack your social media efforts, and raise service costs exponentially. The ether has dissipated, and the 2 percent are now in control.

With so many conversations streaming at us, do we even have the ability to discern which complaints are legitimate any more? Are we conditioning consumers to game the system through complaints because of the easy rewards they can garner from companies who auto-respond with coupons and freebies? What is the cost of THAT over time?

Does every conversation sell stuff?

I’d like to introduce a radical concept. Businesses have to sell stuff.

It’s easy to lose sight of this when we worship companies like Zappos, which states that their goal is to “deliver happiness.” They also have deliver a profit, or all that happiness will go away.  In Tony Hsieh’s wonderful book, Delivering Happiness he admitted that the idea of building a business based on a culture of extreme service came while drinking at a bar one day, lamenting that his company was failing.  It was a desperate experiment that worked, not some well-planned strategic vision.

Yes, he delivers happiness. but he also delivers money.  In this era where ”the Conversation” is king, too many people get caught up in the fear of being left behind and lose sight that we need to show a measurable return on these social media efforts, too.

I had the great pleasure of getting to know Rick Wion of McDonalds this year. There is no smarter marketing talent out there and no company more committed to connecting with its customers in the social media trenches.  McDonalds has a staff of people Facebooking and tweeting all the time.  But some of their tweeters have become so popular that lonely people look for them to come online and tweet with them to pass the time. This is very nice, but how does this sell hamburgers?  At what point do you say, “enough is enough?” What is the cost of our conversation? Lots of companies are facing these issues right now.

Social media angst

I’ve met many great marketers at large American companies and have had the chance to get an inside peak at their social media angst. Here’s a dirty little secret. Deep down, I think most companies wished the social web would just go away.

The Days of Ether, when we didn’t have to “listen” so much, had its benefits.  We could ignore that 2 percent.  We didn’t need $10,000/month listening platforms, social media war rooms, and a budget for teams of tweeters. Consumer Confusion was profitable.

Now if you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you know I am huge advocate of the social web and its potential to transform businesses.  And the fact that it dis-intermediates the business sloppiness that was allowed to exist in the ether is a good thing in the long term. So I’m not saying that that it is not a historic and important channel. Quite the opposite. I’m just saying that it comes with a lot of unanticipated pain.

That ether — and its response time lapse — gave us time to think and analyze. It provided a buffer to get us through the messy process of re-tooling a strategy … or even a company. Diminishing the ether through increased transparency and light-speed information flow is one of the greatest and least-understood impacts of the social web.  And, as both Jay and Tom have written so brilliantly, it is a one-way ticket.

The cost of conversation.  It’s a discussion we need to be having everywhere, don’t you think?

The Delivering Happiness link is an affiliate link.

For years I’ve admired the real-world insights and experienced perspectives of Steve Goldner, perhaps better know as @Social Steve.  I’m pleased that Steve has agreed to be the newest Contributing Columnist to {grow} and I know you’ll enjoy his work!

By Steve Goldner, Contributing {grow} Columnist

I head up social media at a performance marketing agency in New York City and I will tell you, everyone is interested in social media! But getting people to buy in and commit to social media takes MUCH more than having a shiny object.

It might be easy to get in the door, but you must show relevance to business KPIs (key performance indicators) to get commitment for social media. And budgets shift all the time so social media MUST show continuous measurable results. Social media accountability means delivering and demonstrating growth in all relevant parameters that are inputs and building blocks to stated KPIs.

So how do you even go about this?  Here are three simple suggestions that will definitely put you on the right path:

Understanding the Business you Represent
Make sure you know EXACTLY what your company stands for. Formally document a position statement, target market to serve, value proposition you provide for your customers, as well as the communication objectives of the company. Share this with stakeholders of the company and make sure you have concurrence.

This is an extremely important first step for social media because your “social” activities should be aimed at reinforcing your position and value proposition and be targeted to the right people. This does not mean that you are going to explicitly communicate these positions, but you should reflect on these formal documents and look to support your brand position and values when you design your owned media.

Don’t “Post” –  Publish
There are two missions when running a blog and/or community: 1) attract new readers/users, and 2) make sure the existing audience comes back. The nuance between posting and publishing is the difference between simply putting up some words (i.e. posting an article name and URL) versus gaining peoples attention and getting them interested. As an old (CMO) boss of mine would always say – “words are important.”

And if we look at the missions stated above, it is more than just using compelling, engaging words. Plan how your owned media will get easily shared. Build strategy and tactics to get earned media.

Deliver Metrics that Matter to Executives
Executives think in terms of a sales funnel. Yes, I think the funnel is dead (and I have covered that), but that does not really matter if your customer thinks otherwise.

You have to show results in a manner that is relevant to the stakeholders’ perspective. This means being able to measure awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. Notice I did not mention sales. Social media is generally a weak vehicle for direct sales, BUT awareness, consideration, loyalty and advocacy ALL contribute to sales.  Here are a few thoughts (there are many more) on how to measure each:

• Awareness – is typically generated beyond your digital assets. If someone is on your website, blog, or Facebook page, they have already become “aware.” So use a social media monitoring tool. Measure the number of mentions of your brand or website URL.
• Consideration – shows up by checking out your brand and from a digital perspective this can be measured by how many come to brand website. Look at onsite parameters such as visits, pageviews, and time onsite.
• Loyalty – comes when individuals engage with brands and literally say, “I want in.” Easy loyalty measurements include number of comments and interactions, sign up on sites, and the number of friends and followers. Individually, none of these items show loyalty, but looking at them collectively provides loyalty insights.
• Advocates – publically reference your brand. This can be measured by capturing the number of retweets, reblogs, mentions, and positive sentiment for your brand.

Let’s address how these numbers should be considered in context of an overall marketing program.

Looking at specific numbers for a given month really doesn’t tell you anything. And seeing a drop from one month to another or seeing a rise from one month to another should not necessarily alarm you or be cause for celebration, respectively. You will likely see zigzag fluctuations each month based on many confounding events and factors you cannot control.

The relevant information comes from a statistical evaluation of a normalized curve over a number of months, perhaps a 12-month sliding scale. Realistic and true social media success is captured over time and short term successes are probably not be a true indication of market reality.  Can you represent a 5-10% growth in each area month-to-month on the normalized curve? Now that’s meaningful success!

Winners in the social media space have a game plan, meaningful + relevant metrics, and the right people to both execute the plan and provide the appropriate analysis.  Do you have a plan?  Do you feel you have the right talent on board?  How is this changing for you and your company as social media matures as a channel?

Steve Goldner is the Senior Director at MediaWhiz where he leads the social media practice. Steve has been a marketing executive for the past 20+ years and engaged in social media for the last 4 years. You can follow him on Twitter @SocialSteve and visit his own blog at http://socialsteve.wordpress.com .

We’ve tossed around a lot of ideas on {grow} about how technology is impacting our lives, but I’m also really interested in how it is impacting the culture of our companies.

For example, what is it going to be like leading a new workforce that is conditioned to manage relationships through text messages and accustomed to the continual stimulation and reward of video games?   As they enter the workforce, are they going to change our companies?  Or, are our companies going to change them?  Maybe a little of both?

The intersection of technology, Generation Text, and corporate culture will have vast implications for recruiting and retention, training, compensation, HR policies … nearly every company-employee touch-point in fact!

With this backdrop, you can imagine how interested I was to read a report from McKinsey on a competition they held to identify how Web 2.0 tools and technologies are changing management.  From 143 entries, here are five big ideas:

1. Sharing common resources more efficiently

Employees of the Dutch government are using web-based tools to share offices, conference spaces, and other resources. The employees were facing too many bureaucratic hurdles, and even had to reserve meeting space in their own buildings through an outside agency!  One particularly frustrated employee tweeted her exasperation to colleagues, and they decided to form a group to build their own reservation system with open-source software.  They rolled it ou,t building by building, and now the system includes more than 53 offices and 554 work spaces across the country. The employees say the net result is a “shift from the focus of individual ‘ownership’ as defined by specific government buildings and offices to a sense of ‘stewardship’ shared across the spectrum of government.”

2. Global training with local experts

Essilor International, a global maker of ophthalmic lenses, created an internal training program that mixes in-person and Web 2.0 formats to transmit best practices among 102 sites in 40 countries. The company says that a mastery level that once took three years to achieve can now be reached in about one.  A lens-processing center in Thailand, for example, developed a game to teach new workers how to understand the shape of a given kind of lens; now it’s used in Brazil too. A social-network feature enables coaching across multinational locations. The system is called “Entangled Talents” because the company said “the talents of individual employees across the globe have become entangled, creating a web that supports the company’s daily operations.”

3. Powering continuous improvement 

Best Buy has more than 1,500 locations and more than 100,000 employees on the frontlines of customer service.  In an effort to make sure that senior managers learn what those employees are hearing from customers, the company created an online platform that rewarded employee feedback on what they are hearing from customers.  The platform allows everyone to see collated information from all stores in a useful and searchable format. This information is powering a movement of continuous improvement that has affected things as simple as the signs in one store and as complicated as decisions about how to implement a national promotion.

4. Social networking for new product development 

Rite-Solutions, a software company, built an internal idea marketplace that has so far generated 15 new commercial products that account for 20 percent of the company’s total revenue. This system goes far beyond a typical brain-storming platform. The internal website connects potential new products with the resources, experience, and expertise that can bring ideas to life. The internal social networking site enables communities to organically develop to further improve, develop, and commercialize new product ideas.

5. Using internal communities to reduce time-to-market

The Mexico-based cement giant Cemex introduced an internal-collaboration platform called Shift, which has helped the company reduce the time needed to introduce new products and make internal process improvements. Shift uses a mix of wikis, blogs, discussion boards, and Web-conferencing tools to speed problem-solving.  When employees use Shift, ideas, suggestions, and  recommendations bubble up across the network. Communities of interest are form to tackle challenges common to their locations, markets, and skill sets.  Projects can move forward without the barriers posed by traditional hurdles, such as over-reliance on e-mail and live meetings. The payoff is lower cycle  times, faster time to market, and real-time process improvement.  The company has 500 active internal problem-solving communities.  An example: Cemex invited 400 employees involved with its ready-mix products to help figure out which worked best and which were redundant. The result is a slimmed-down product line offered in a constantly updated catalog available globally.

How is your company using social technologies and Web 2.0 tools to manage smarter?  Any case studies and successes you’d like to share?

In a blog post almost two years ago about the best business idea for social media marketing, I made a prediction that I think stands up.  I said that there would be increasing demand for out-sourced social media management and content farms that would pump out low-cost, low value content in a Wal-Mart kind of way.

I’m not not saying this is necessarily recommended!  I just thought it would happen … and it is.  Now, here’s the next big question … can you make money managing social media for others?

My original prediction was based on a statement I heard at many companies: “Can you please just do this social media stuff for me?”

Of the course the purists will contend that everybody should do their own social media because of the “authenticity” value.  Certainly that is an ideal, but I’m also a realist. If people want to out-source their social media and there is a buck to made, it will certainly happen somewhere.   I also think there is some value to a consultant or agency helping people along for some period of time.  When you first got your driver’s license somebody still had to sit beside you and teach you how to drive, right?

In my job as a consultant, and especially in my job as a college educator teaching grad-level students from a variety of corporations, I see many approaches to social media management. Now, this is a short blog post and there are lots of nuances and exceptions, but IN GENERAL, here are some broad trends in social media management:

Mega brands – I can’t name names, but I have had a chance to witness some AMAZING and sophisticated social media marketing programs. These companies are beginning to make correlations between “share of voice” and true marketshare, using listening platforms to track micro-trends and the “cool kids,” and taking location-based marketing to a whole new level.

These companies have the resources to hire the biggest agencies and best minds in the world to help them navigate social media labyrinths and determine a strategy, but generally, they are organizing and resourcing to respond to the new opportunities. One brand has renamed part of their marketing department “Customer Connections.”

Medium-sized companies. I have a limited view of the world (of course), but I’ll be honest. Unless you are an elite brand, I believe at least 95 percent of the companies I see are desperately confused about what to do about social media.  I think they would just like for it to go away so they can return to having a trade booth at the annual conference in Las Vegas.

They probably don’t have a corporate culture that can easily adapt to the transformation needed to “listen” instead of “broadcast” and they simply want to check a box to do SOMETHING. You, know … I actually think there is some value in that.  A company that is at least thinking through the platforms, attempting to listen on the new channels and dipping their toe into content marketing is taking a step in the right direction.  Most of these companies at least have the vision and budget to hire an agency to get them started on social media marketing.

Small businesses.  As I wrote last week, I think social media can provide an advantage to most small businesses, but that doesn’t mean it actually does unless they are working on it!   Why isn’t it happening?

1. They’re overwhelmed by the concept and don’t know where to start.
2. They started a Facebook page and nobody “liked” them so they quit.
3. They understand the concept but don’t have the time or resources to do anything consistent and meaningful.
4. Their marketing budget is tied up in local newspaper and TV ads and they don’t have anything left for something new.
5. When you bring it up, they stare you down and tell you they “Don’t need the Facebox or The Tweeter,” usually followed by ”Dammit.”

Unless your customer falls into Category 5, they may be asking you to manage their social media program for them.  I see the following business models emerging:

Local support.  The new category of social media gurus are trying to teach best practices and perhaps do some hands-on social media management.  My take is that most of these efforts eventually fail because you are communicating for somebody else, which is probably not sustainable, and the labor cost to actually do this stuff is so high –and the results so undefinable in the short-term — that customers lose interest. People with a limited budget need this to work NOW.

Cookie cutter.  I am seeing a ton of people and small agencies offering social media packages — “our gold package features two tweets per day, a Facebook update, and one blog post per week!”  I truly despise this approach because it institutionalizes lazy marketing. But it is happening, a lot. I also forecast that most of these efforts will fail because at some point, the customer is going to wonder when all the new sales are going to start coming in from these two tweets per day they are paying for … and of course there will not be any. So this is a band-aid but I don’t see it working broadly.

Overseas.  Kind of a hybrid. Let’s solve the labor cost problem by hiring low-cost virtual assistants in Vietnam or The Philippines to do the tweets and blogs for us. I have a friend offering this to customers now and the VA can set-up WordPress websites so inexpensively he gives them away.  There are a multitude of problems associated with this approach but it at least addresses the labor issue.

Coaching.  I think the only viable long-term solution for most small businesses is to get some coaching.  I have successfully taken this approach with several clients. They buy an hour or so of my time each week and we methodically work on a step-by-step plan to eventually create a culture, an organization, and an actionable strategy appropriate for the company resources and budget. This seems to be the approach that will work best. It is not fast (and a lot of people hate that! ) but it does slowly integrate these practices into the fabric of the company, get real employees involved, and become a natural extension of their sales and marketing strategy.

I know it’s a big world and there are probably lots of other advances and models around.  What are you seeing?  What’s working or not working? Have you found a way to monetize social media management?

Illustration: Courtesy Toothpaste for Dinner.com

I woke up Thursday morning to a shocking development. My ego had been knocked down 60 pegs.

On the right hand column of this blog there is a fancy orange badge naming this site as a top marketing blog, as determined by AdAge magazine. Last week, the organization changed its magic formula to upend a rating system that I, and many other bloggers had depended on as relative sign of the success of our blogs.  In a recent podcast, Mitch Joel recently told me it was the only metric he follows every day, for example. Gini Dietrich posted that she was “really pissed” by the changes.

The system was far from perfect, but if you looked at the results … yeah, they seemed about right.

The AdAge rating system depended on five variables that blended together in a secret sauce to come up with a numerical score. Two of the most meaningful factors, PostRank and Collective Intellect discontinued the availability of their API (raw data source) and had to be replaced.

Post Rank was the most important component, I thought, because it seemed to be an indicator of strong content. It considered how your article had been shared, the level of engagement through comments, and if other people wrote blogs about your blog.

These two important measurements have been replaced by feeds from Facebook and Twitter. To give you some idea of the impact on {grow}’s rating, my PostRank score was 47 out of 50 points … my Facebook score is a 1.  I don’t know why, but it is what it is.

This change had a cataclysmic effect on the rankings. Some blogs moved up or dropped down by 200 places or more!   Many of the changes make no sense at all. For example, one blog that is more or less in my “old” position has not been updated since 2009.  What’s that supposed to mean?

It looks to me that losing these two key scores has made the AdAge ranking virtually meaningless.  However, I’m not arguing from a position of strength since I was one of the big losers in the chaos!

My reaction to this was embarassing. At first, I was shocked and angry.  I spend a lot of time telling people NOT to worry about the numbers and just do great work … and here I was worrying about the numbers!  I was pissed off at AdAge and I was pissed at myself for feeling so strongly about it.

I think this pokes about at a recent theme of this blog — social proof and the fact that oftentimes on the social web a numerical rating provides a more important symbol of accomplishment than actual accomplishment. But this time it really hit home. Even if it’s a fake badge, the business benefits of being on the list can be real.

Now I had fallen into the social proof vortex, even though I’m supposed to know better!   Arrrgh.

At various times during the Day of the AdAge Apocalypse I would catch myself being angry about the shift only to self-correct and remind myself that nothing really important in my life had changed. This Jekyl and Hyde routine continued about once an hour all day.

As high-minded as I would LIKE to be about this development, I can’t deny that this little report card meant something to me. I work so very hard to make {grow} an interesting, relevant and entertaining blog and I felt like I got bitch slapped. Just being honest about it.

I’m a little more calm about it now. I know I need to be focused on “real life” … but my blog has become real life too, hasn’t it?  This whole thing feels like your business credit rating being determined by freaking Facebook or something.

Anybody want to weigh in on this?  Slap me back to reality? Take your best shot baby.

In a social media world filled with questionable research and lightweight infographics, this is research we can really use. I’m proud to be able to provide an advance summary of this report to the {grow} community.

Here is the report summary of data from more than 1,000 European B2B purchasing agents.  What are your main take-aways from this research?

The dominance of ‘traditional’ online

Despite the rising popularity of social media, “traditional online” channels of supplier websites, search and emails are those most used by buyers.

68% of buyers said they consulted supplier websites, while 65% used search engines to find the information they needed to support their purchase decision. The use of social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and Facebook all grew (Facebook, in fact, doubled in popularity from 2010 to 2011) but they are still much less frequently used than the ‘traditional online’ methods. Of course, this does not prove that social media is on the wane. A Google search frequently leads to a link provided by a social media network even if the buyer does not start there.

The youth factor

Splitting the data between under-30s and over-30s shows the inevitable tendency of younger buyers to use the newer channels — the under-30s were three times more likely to use blogs to help them select suppliers, for example — suggesting that social media usage will only increase as one generation gradually succeeds the other. But in the short term, it would appear that investing in SEO and websites should still command the lion’s share of the marketing budget.

A growing hunger for information

Comparing results from last year shows a significant growth in the number of information channels used by buyers. This is a clear sign that we are moving from the traditional outbound marketing model [where we used to broadcast information in the hope that some of it would stick] to an inbound model [where buyers choose what information they need and go and find it themselves online]. This means that there is a greater appetite for information – and therefore a greater burden on the brands to create more content of all kinds, in order to satisfy this hunger. It is clear that companies with a structured, considered programme for creating whitepapers, videos, blogs and the like are going to be the ones more likely to appear on buyers’ radar as they do their online research.

Are webinars coming of age?

One of the most dramatic change in behaviour will interest marketers who run their own events, because we have seen the proportion of buyers who used offline events when seeking purchase information fall dramatically. Last year, one in three buyers attended an event as part of their information gathering; in 2011 that proportion had almost halved to just 18%. This was accompanied by – although not necessarily caused by – an equally marked rise in the use of online events or webinars. One in ten buyers used this channel last year; in 2011 that rose to 27%, almost a threefold increase

There could be many reasons. But it is reasonable to assume that buyers are getting more used to webinars and that brands are creating many more of them. But perhaps the most interesting observation is that this is a classic case of digitisation; of digital technology creating a version of something that is utterly distinct from its offline counterpart.

But this is only part of the picture. In terms of influence, webinars do not come close to real events, which were rated as the most influential information source across all buying stages with 46% of buyers giveng them a rating of 9 or 10 for influence.

A two-tier Europe?

One of the improvements of this year’s Buyersphere Report was to include and compare the responses of 500 business buyers in France, Germany, Benelux and Italy. B2B brands are increasingly operating on a pan-European basis and we need to understand cultural and behavioural differences.

These differences emerged most strongly when we looked at the social media information sources used. In Germany and the UK, 48% and 46% of buyers respectively used social media tools during the buying process; this compared to just 22%, 26% and 35% of French, Benelux and Italian respondents. The use of traditional online, by contrast, was consistent across all five, varying only between 88% and 93%. In the UK, 16% of buyers used Facebook at some point in their research, compared with only 5% of Benelux buyers.

Attitudes to sharing

Another fascinating insight was the attitudes towards forwarding information. While tools like Twitter and Facebook are very efficient at quickly spreading information through friend networks, they are not the preferred options. Only 9% said they used Facebook “very often” to share professional information, whilst 27% used the company intranet and 44% used email with the same level of frequency.

But how willing are users to share their own data? Marketers often agonise over whether to allow their content to spread freely or to use it to generate leads by insisting on a data capture form. The Report suggests we should tread carefully, with 55% of buyers discouraged ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ often from downloading content by the content owner’s insistence on data capture. There were geographical differences here too: 22% of UK buyers said they were discouraged ‘very’ often, compared to 10-12% in Germany, France and Belgium.

If you would like to download the free Base One research, you can find the report at:  www.b2bmarketing.net/buyersphere11.

What are your conclusions from this interesting report?

I am going to go on a rant. But first, while I still have my composure, allow me to tell you a short, yet relevant, story.

I started my corporate career in the midst of an economic downturn for my industry.  I was working for a Fortune 100 company and to get through this difficult time, the company brought in an outside consulting group to conduct a little exercise called “Overhead Value Analysis.” Simply put, every person from the adminstrative assistant to a vice president had to stand up in front of a group of strangers and justify their existence by explaining how they were contributing to shareholder value.

This was a very stressful exercise, especially for a young man who was still finding his way to the water cooler.  But thankfully I was always a numbers geek and could pull out a chart (probably drawn by hand in those days) to show what I was doing, why I was doing it, and how what I was accomplishing was tied to the company objectives. This was an important lesson in my young career and one that has always served me well through many downturns along the way.

So when I hear another round of gurus pontificating last week about the unnecessary annoyance of measuring social media activities I want to shake somebody. I am so very sick of people who have never had to work in a corporate bureaucracy or manage through a budget crisis explain that measuring social media is like measuring your mother, or your pants. Here’s another one that drives me nuts: “The ROI of social media is that your company exists in five years” … again implying that you need to do social media, just because you need to do social media. Bullshit.

Don’t you believe it. You MUST keep measuring, assessing, adjusting, improving.  Never get caught with your stats down.

At some point in the life of every company, there will be a financial imperative to slash overhead costs. The bubble always bursts, at least in a free economy.  When that happens, everything will be evaluated under the icy glare of number-crunchers — do we cut or not cut? This is the day of reckoning that defines the ”implied economic value” of any effort. Even something as seemingly mundane as social media. You better be able to articulate a business case, and it better be something better than page views and Klout scores, Bub.

Why? Social media is NOT FREE. Every economic activity in a corporation directly or indirectly has to contribute to shareholder value.

Let’s look at how “un-free” social media really is. Let’s assume you have one person working full-time on social media marketing. We’ll assign that person a salary of $60,000. In a typical company, standard health, 401(k) and other benefit costs equal another 50% of the base salary, or in this case, $30,000.

We’ll assign another 20% of base salary for overhead such as office space, shared services support and technology. That’s $12,000. We won’t even address travel, training, or bonuses.

So, our minimal full-up cost for one social media professional is $102,000. As a business owner, are you willing to spend more than $100,000 per year without requiring any accountability for a return? What kind of a company are you running?

I’m a practical guy. I know it may be cost-prohibitive or even impossible to determine the specific ROI of your efforts. Sometimes you need to look at qualitative tools for social media measurement. But there is no excuse for not tracking key measures that contribute to your company’s goals. To support your credibility, your long-term viability, and your personal career in social media marketing, YOU MUST MEASURE. 

This is an emotional topic for some, but it shouldn’t be. This is basic business common sense.  Are you with me on this one?