Define "success" for a succesful blogging program

Fear of failure is now one of the main reasons why individuals are reluctant to start blogging. Quite rightly, most of us want to be succesful in what we do.

As consultants, we often work with organisations to help their employees to start blogging. We will be more persuasive if we define "success" early in the process, in conversation with the employees involved.

But be prepared. Almost everyone will bring their own definition of "success" to the discussion.

For example, those who have a traditional marketing/advertising background might define success in terms of the number of eyeballs exposed to the intended "message". To succeed on those terms, the best strategy is probably not blogging — sky writing would be more cost-effective. So, be prepared to talk about engagement not eyeballs, and the role of true conversations (whether media interviews, government briefings or blog posts) in changing yourself and your stakeholders.

Likewise, blog aficionados might define success as being the next Engaget. Well, I'll never win an Olympic marathon, but I still derive enourmous benefit from hitting the treadmill whenever I can. Define success in more realistic terms: engaging with specific stakeholders in a specific way for a specific reason — something achievable and immensely valuable to the organisation.

Published 07 March 2007 06:02 by Steven Noble

Filed under: Consulting, Blogging

Comments

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  Ham said:

  The blogosphere is reality. A particularly perverted form of reality, but reality none the less. What I mean by that is that it is an environment you enter voluntarily for a myriad of reasons. Once you are there, you are on your own and your success or failure is entirely up to you.
  
  You define your own success criteria, and you measure yourself on it. For some it may be hits, some the number of comments, some don't even allow comments. The risk is that you set your success criteria and you discover you are not up to it. And you have nobody else to blame.
  
  Caveat Bloggor
  March 9, 2007 11:59
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  Laurel Papworth said:

  I totally agree with Ham - success is personalised in the same way the web experience is. We experience success in individual ways.
  
  A Splog (spam blog) will define success by trackbacks and pings. Some will define by # of comments. Others by reader numbers. Some prefer small but specific readers.
  
  For example, my demographic tends to older business people (though I am continually surprised at younger techie types wandering in) I have less comments ON my blog and more emails ABOUT my blog.
  
  Also for me, blogging is about becoming an 'expert du jour' in my little niche. I have been interviewed by the press, asked to present at conferences and requested to give consultations- none of this is a specifically web2.0 (pings, trackbacks, comments, rss, ratings, rankings) but still represents success to me.
  
  Traditional Media doesn't track that sort of flow-on benefit. We Media gets it tho. :)
  March 18, 2007 22:54