KingNils

A few days ago, I wrote a post for the Daimler-Blog regarding how to measure the success of coporate blogs. I tried to adapt the 3-dimensions-model developed by Matthias Schwenk in order to display the success for corporate blogs.

[slideshare id=228504&doc=measuring-success-of-corporate-blogs-1200390739963454-3&w=425]

Matthias Schwenk from bwl zwei null has developed a useful model to characterize corporate blogs, and therefore define factors for success and failure.

The three dimensions:

• Message (central, peripheral),
• Opinion (critical, uncritical) and
• Networking (high, low)

allow a good characterization of corporate blogs. Still, they give little hint about how succesful a blog is with respect to the company’s goals.

Therefore, one has to aks himself how to relate expectations and current situation. As a simple expansion of the Schwenk-model it would make sense to display the three dimensions on a scale (here from 0 to 10). Based on the blog’s goals rough expectation values can be defined an displayed on the scale for every dimension separately. Then, an evaluation of the blog with respect to the actual status should be conducted and the respective numerical value should be estimated. For the Daimler-Blog could look as follows:

If one now simply derives the relative values and applies an equal weighting mechanism, the blog had an overall success value of 64.4%. However, one should appreciate that a different weighting scheme might have to be applied according to the type of blog. A marketing blog for example will define success more about the networking success instead of the more or less dictated opinion, while an employee blog focusses more on transparency and the underlying message. Therefore I assumed the following comprehensive model for the Daimler-Blog:

Only after appropriately weighting the different dimensions, the success of differently targeted blogs becomes comparable. In this case, the Daimler-Blog had a weighted success value of 70.2%.

Of course this model still is of a somewhat subjective nature, because the success relation is based on rough estimation. Therefore, one has to find real indicators for the different dimensions as a next step.