TheWayoftheWeb

When you’re looking at why companies might be reluctant to use social media and blogs properly, and why measurement is so important, it’s important to remember there’s a very real cost involved to them.

It’s something I’m acutely aware of, both in my professional role, and particularly in my personal life at the moment. My blogging and use of social networks has definitely been affected by my other commitments, whether it’s doing work on our house, sorting the bills, fixing the cars, or taking care of our pets. And the biggest commitment is to our baby son,  which has had a big effect on how I can justify spending time online.

And in my professional role, I’m very aware that although implementing social media work has no direct financial cost, it has a real cost in terms of allocating time and resource.

Just as I wouldn’t expect to pay for something I didn’t receive, it’s unreasonable to expect a company to pay for for staff, and all the additional costs (office space, broadband, etc, etc,) to pursue social media engagement without them receiving a return which exceeds that value (increase in sales, website traffic etc). That’s where planning, measurement, and being realistic all come into play…

(And even this post has taken twice as long as it used to, due to my son needing attention!)

I’ve just spotted some research by Emarketer on US blog readership which shows that, despite the justified excitement and uptake of Twitter et al, blog readership is set to grow from 94.1 million readers in 2007 to 145.3 million in 2012. That figure is people reading a blog at least once a month.

Whether or not that’s totally correct, what’s interesting for me is that the 94.1million in 2007 is 50% of U.S. internet users. So 50% of internet users in 2007 didn’t read a blog once a month in that year. Is this because they didn’t know about them? Didn’t care about them? Didn’t trust them? Need them?
Definitely shows there’s still room for growth in the blog world, with blog advertising predicted to more than double by 2012.

Get more details, and the option to obtain the full report from eMarketer.

And it’s all for charity.

Social media type Jennifer Leggio is not only running the Nike Women’s Marathon for charity – she’s also persuaded some top social media figures to auction their skills to raise money for Team in Training, the fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

And you could get some real value by bidding for yourself or your company. Names on the block include Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, Geoff Livingston, Aaron Strout, and Greg Verdino.

If you don’t recognise their names, there is a short bio on the link above. I’ll add in the appropriate blog links in detail when I’m not sat on a train…

There’s going to be some interruption to posting as I manually import about 6 months of blog posts that appear to have gone missing during my transfer from Blogger to Wordpress.

The original import failed completely, until I spotted other users had problems importing – specifically when they are hosted by Godaddy. The easy way around this is to export, and then import to a hosted Wordpress.com blog, and then import it from there to your hosted blog.

Worked fine for me until the import failed due to a rogue character somewhere that I just can’t find.

So now it’s Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for a while, whilst also trying to post some new stuff every so often, and rebuild by Page Rank and link equity…Who would ever transfer blogs!