So wow! I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've been required reading for a college course. Welcome to my blog.
Since you're studying audience research, here are a few things you should know about how I measure the success of my blog:
- I know how many unique visits and page views I get each day, and how that number trends up and down over time.
- I know a lot about my readers and how they behave. I may not know exactly who you are -- but I do know where you've come from (your domain and what site you were on right before coming to mine), which pages you viewed, in what order and where you went when you left. For example, I saw that a bunch of Ithaca students were hitting the site and that most of you were coming to me from Professor Gregson's syllabus. I also know that one of you checked out the enlarged version of this Britney Spears photo from last Sunday's post. Hmmm...
- I also know how many people subscribe to my RSS feed. This is an important number because, unlike most other forms of media (which count audience based on the number of people that go to their site, flip through their magazine, tune into their station or drive past their billboard), we bloggers know that you're busy and can't take the time to visit our sites every day. You can read my blog in an RSS reader like Bloglines or a personal page (like MyYahoo! or iGoogle) without ever coming to visit this site.
- But at the end of the day, I care less about how many readers I have and more about how engaged those readers are. So by reading all of the comments my readers leave, I have a pretty good idea about what topics cause controversy, strike a chord or at least get people talking (well, er, writing at least.) At the end of the day, a blog is a conversation (not a pulpit) so if I'm doing my job right, people aren't just listening, they're talking too. And on a good day, the comments are even better than the original posts.
- Finally, we bloggers have an unhealthy obsession with a metric called "authority," as measured by Technorati. Authority is the number of other, unique blogs that have linked to a given blog over the past six months. The higher the authority number, the more influential that blog is likely to be. Basically, it is a measure of how important other bloggers think I am. My authority has been on a steady decline all summer, which is really bumming me out. Other than giving everyone in the blogosphere a single third-party benchmark, authority really is a measure of what I would call "distributed conversation" -- in other words, a measure of how many other bloggers are talking about me or something I've written. For marketers, this is a great indicator of how likely it is that a particular idea will go viral in the blogosphere. If a highly authoritative blogger writes about a topic (for example, a new product launch or a customer service problem), chances are that a bunch of other bloggers that have linked to him (or her) in the past will also blog about that topic -- and so on and so on and so on.
There's a lot I'm leaving out. I'm sure that one of my blogfriends will chime in and point out some key metric or another that I should have mentioned. In fact, I'll be disappointed if they don't.
Anyway, enjoy your course and good luck with your own blogs. Here's a hint for next week -- drop a comment and let me know the URL for your blog and I'll show you one way bloggers promote themselves and each other. Otherwise, it looks like I'll see you again in Week 11.
Peace.
