This morning I received an email from a business associate pointing me over to a Wall Street Journal piece that was written this past weekend. It touches on the evolution of blogs over the past decade with about a dozen different viewpoints regarding what blogs mean to different people and organizations as well as how they will continue to impact the future of communications.

 It's a solid read, but perhaps the essence of the article is captured in one sentence:

“Ultimately, the blog is only as good as the information presented.”

As a new generation of savvy Internet users mature, they will have been raised with much skill in regard to reading, researching, navigating and sometimes completely relying on the Internet.

[From Happy Blogiversary, Wall Street Journal]
“The consumption of blogs is often avid and occasionally obsessive. But more commonly, it is utterly natural, as if turning to them were no stranger than (dare one say this here?) picking one’s way through the morning’s newspapers. The daily reading of virtually everyone under 40 — and a fair few folk over that age — now includes a blog or two, and this reflects as much the quality of today’s bloggers as it does a techno-psychological revolution among readers of news and opinion.”

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I love this line, published today, in this Evening Telegraph item out of the UK:

Far too much PR is undertaken as a result of a vague desire to “raise our profile”.

The piece is about all the many things you can do in the name of public relations to get the message out, but that all too often all too many of these things are not measured; goals are not quantified.

No kidding! Can you, for example, tell whether or not anyone actually read your news release? How many people? How long did they spend on it? Did they take any action because of it? How about your trade show event… how many leads were generated? What was the cost per lead? How many leads turned in to sales? Were these sales bigger or smaller than your average first-time orders? Did any of the new business comes from repeat sales? Was it all worth it?

At the risk of beating a dead horse to death again, the miracle of social media is that you can measure, monitor, track, plot, and value real actions by real people doing real things… in real time! With a blog, just as one example, you can know how many visitors came, how long they stayed, what they read, in what order they read it, where they came from, where they are located, are they new visitors or returning visitors, how they found you… Over time you can quantify whether your message is being heard by more or fewer people and whether or not more or fewer people are taking the action you desire. In my humble opinion, it is exactly these kind of metrics that sour a lot of traditional PR people on the new media. It's much easier to simply say, "We issued 24 news releases this year, up 30% over last year." Great!

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