Blogging in staffing - what’s in it for me?

David Searns from Haley Marketing (not brown-nosing, but it’s a site that I’ve used as a valuable resource over the last several years) opened up the Pandora’s Box of social media in my previous post – ROI!

I definitely agree with David, that blogging (or any other activity, for that matter), need to present economic value to an organization to justify doing it in the first place. That said, I personally don’t think blogging will directly lead to reduced recruiting costs, reduced sales costs, or increased revenue from current clients, and even if it does, I’m not sure what tangible metrics one can present to support it.

A blog isn’t a magic tool that will do any of this, and anyone who remotely thinks it would, might as well just not do it at all because they are going to be severely disappointed. There’s just no way a blog, in itself, will deliver measurable savings or increased revenue.

The trouble with social media measurement is that we’re attempting to quantify the value of human engagement and human interaction. How do you measure a shift in attitude within your target market? If your participation in conversations around a certain topic results in you being viewed as a subject matter expert, or if it earns you trust points from your readers who just might be potential clients, how do we quantify these?

But I do agree, metrics are absolutely necessary because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So the question for social media would be, what would you measure and how would you measure it?

There are lots of things you can measure, it’s just a matter of which items represents the goals you are trying to accomplish. Are you going for pageviews? A higher Google Pagerank? Referrals to your website? Trackbacks? Technorati Authority? Number of comments? Number of subscribers to your feed? Number of followers on Twitter?

It’s still early on, but perhaps after more data is available, one can make a correlation between pageviews, referrals, Google Pagerank, etc with revenue and savings. I’m personally not there yet, but it’s definitely something I would like to measure once I have data.

I suppose the bottom line is that while social media must be taken seriously within an organization, it should be seen as a part of a larger strategy.