Blog Measurement – Module 8

The blog I will evaluate for this post is entitled A Taste of General Mills, and is located at:  http://www.blog.generalmills.com

As you will not doubt see, our blog is subtle, yet contains a nice mixture of content, flash, and a soft, welcoming blue hue. It is also fully integrated with the likes of the social media titans (i.e. YouTube, Twitter, etc.)

However, some of the metrics related to the blog are a bit disappointing to say the least. The first metric – Raw Author Contribution – calculates as follows:

Our RAC in Post/Month for the life of the blog comes out to be:

483 posts / 17 months of blogging = 28.4 PPM

In content created, the RAC for the past 30 days would be:

700 words / post (average) / 17 posts = 41.17 WPP

The next metric – Conversation Rate – ought to pose a red flag to General Mills, as the ratio of comments to posts is absolutely abysmal.  

Our CR for the month of October would be:

0/17 = 0!!!

Not a single person has made a comment on one of our blog posts in the past month!

Our Technorati Authority rating is:

0 (I assume) since I couldn't find the blog using any method on Technorati.com

In order to measure the costs of this effort, we could need to include the costs of hosting the blog, as well as the costs paying employees to maintain and write for this blog (that few people seem to read). 

Finally, we could then take that calculated cost and calculate the opportunity costs of having them focus on something else (i.e. an actual job related task), as I imagine the OC of the blog is rather high based on these metrics.

Personally, I wonder if a blog is really a necessary marketing / exposure tool, or if it is simply being done to ensure that we’re “covering the media bases.” It seems to me that our other social media outlets (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) are all much more active than the blog in terms of comment to content ratio. In all honesty – after considering the potential time wasted on this effort – I would suggest that the best thing GMI could do to “improve” the blog would be to shut it down and focus those resources elsewhere. After looking over these metrics, I seriously wonder if anyone outside of the marketing group would miss it.