The conventional wisdom about blogs is that it's all about
popularity - more page views, more hits, more subscribers, more more
more. With that comes a manifest obligation to measure all of the
inputs and outputs of the system and to construct pages that attract
the maximum number of viewers. The entire population of inexpert "pro
bloggers", with their teaser headlines and pointless numbered lists
pulled straight from Cosmopolitan, live in this world of ever-declining
ad revenues measured in pennies per thousand pages.
If you are an
expert, however, you are not after explanations that cater to the
masses, and you are not after a style or a structure that generates the
maximum number of eyeballs looking at your stuff. Most of those
eyeballs are irrelevant. Your readers have names, not numbers; you
know them; they know you; and you rely on them not as abstract millions
of minions but as individuals with whom you are telling and discovering a story. The Blogger's Secret strategy values one good conversation more than a thousand anonymous page views.
Advertisers
on the net who don't live in the pennies-per-thousand world live in the
"cost per conversion" world, where success is measured by the number of
very qualified people who pass through a very narrow funnel into the
next stage of a process. If you are a real estate blogger, you value
the person who has given you a name and phone number and email address
and permission to contact you, and a thousand random visitors are not as
good as one real person. If you are an expert in landslides, then a
moment by moment translation of an accounts of an imminent mudslide
chronicled on Chinese television is far and above more relevant to
your work than a thousand miscellaneous hits from Stumbleupon.
If you build systems to regularly measure things, be aware that you will try to improve them. Be careful what you measure. It may be better to not measure anything until you are certain what your goals are, and only then start to keep track of some aspect of them. There is a quality without a number which resists homogenization and standardization and should be kept in mind if not in a spreadsheet.
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Some questions posed by this to answer in the future.
How do you measure and collect people who know and support what you are doing?
What ways can you identify specific people who will add their expertise to your efforts?
How do you use expert finding systems such as LinkedIn to improve your work?
When you do turn on analytics tools, what should you track and measure, and how do you do it?
Something about "pointless numbered bullshit" (credit Brian Kerr for that phrase) and the "quality without a number" (also Brian Kerr, via Chris Alexander)
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