You may see me on Twitter as @RichardKahuna.

Now, as a personal policy, I try to follow everyone who follows me.  It’s only polite, and after all we are trying to have a conversation.  So a numerically balanced convo, I think, is the way to go.  There are some exceptions to my personal policy, though.

Occasionally, I’ll get followers who really don’t have much relation to my business or hobbies.  I check their profile, and most who follow me are related professionally or have an interest in the same hobbies as I.  But some are not related or don’t have a common interest.  It’s those I don’t follow back.  I’m not really interested in following those who have another cash rich plan for my business life, or those who can improve my spirit overnight.  And there are plenty of those on Twitter.

So generally I’m balanced numerically, followers vs. following.

But there are others on Twitter who aren’t even close to being balanced, followers vs. following; and a lot of those are media companies.  They want you to follow them, with their tweets that aren’t much more than just a rehash (no pun intended) of what’s already on their air or in their pages.  You know who I mean.  I’ve blogged about some of them before.  They’re not interested in a conversation, just another “channel” to broadcast their message.

And that’s not what social’s about.

So, next time you’re on Twitter, or you see those Twitter follow notices coming into your emailbox.  Be kind.  Remember that it’s about a conversation.

Follow others as you would have them follow unto you.

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In our previous post on this subject, we discussed how you may analyze a return on investment for your competitor’s blog program. This is a competitive intelligence job desired by many companies involved in the corporate blogosphere. The previous post talked about defining the competitive returns. Today, in this post, we’ll discuss the actual investments that the competitor needs to make in order to create and maintain a company blog.

The Investments

Below, in Figure 1, you’ll find the investments that a competitor must make in their corporate blogging program. Now, some folks may read these and think: “Hey, these aren’t investments. These are costs.”

If you find yourself leaning that way, please change your thinking cap now.

They’re investments. Here’s why.

Costs are expenditures made which achieve approximately the same return value in the short run, with no little or no value expected in the long run. Investments are dedications of funds to something where the expectation of return in the long run is in excess of the amount dedicated. In other words, read that as “profit.”

Figure 1

This is what you’ll do when you invest these funds in a corporate blog marketing program; you’ll expect a return over the amount dedicated to the effort. And so will your competitors. After all, they’re not a bunch of fools. If they were, you wouldn’t consider analyzing their blog marketing program.

Let us discuss in more detail the investments that must be made in a corporate blog marketing program.

• Blogging Platform – This is the software that manages the blogging process. It’s relatively inexpensive. Some of it is even free, although we don’t recommend the free versions.
• Policy Creation – These are the blogging rules and procedures made by management. Management will consider who will do the blog writing, what the content of the posts will be, when the article posts will be made, how topics for articles will be determined, what needs to be derived from the blog marketing program, and other issues. To make these rules takes time and time, even salaried time, is money that could be used elsewhere. So that money must be apportioned to the blog project expense ledger and regarded as an investment in the blog marketing program.
• Training – It’s expected that someone other than those who make the blogging rules will carry them out. So, instruction in the policies and procedures determined from the policy creation step will be needed. Again, training takes time. The usage of this time must be credited to the blog marketing program ledger.
• Employee/Author Writing Time – The explicit price of blogging is fairly low (i.e., software and infrastructure), but, like the policy creation and training steps, writing time is an implicit investment. So, the writing time must be assessed, budgeted and controlled.
• Legal Review – Company attorneys should be consulted during the Policy Creation step so that rules and procedures may be formed regarding the content of blog articles and copyright issues governing photographs and other intellectual property to be posted on the blog. As we all know, attorneys aren’t cheap, even corporate ones. After all, their time could be applied to other things. So any time that attorneys apply to the blog marketing program must be logged as an investment.

Identifying the Numbers

How are these investment figures identified for your competitor? The amounts of time that the competitor has dedicated to the above tasks may very well have been discussed in the social media. Competitive intelligence from the target blog itself may be available. A good scrape of relevant social media by the competitive intelligence manager may prove beneficial in identifying the number of hours your competitor devoted or, at least, the number of hours devoted by companies similar to your target. Using the latter, of course, would involve an estimate, but that’s why it’s called competitive intelligence and not competitive information. From there it’s a short leap to pair an hourly rate with the time spent, and then it’s just arithmetic.

Short of finding any tidbits about the amount of time devoted to the target blogging program, a reasonable estimate can be derived via a bit of “internal introspection” within your own organization. A few meetings with the appropriate personnel should begin to flesh out some estimates of the amount of hours that would need to be devoted to each of the above tasks. After that, an assignment of hourly rates, then the arithmetic.

The Actual Calculation

Once you’ve determined all your cost reductions for a specific period of time, which is what we blogged about in our other post, these cost reductions become the Returns. To define the return on investment, the ROI, is then just a simple arithmetic matter in which Returns are represented as a percentage of the Investments.

Competitive Returns/Competitive Investments = Competitive ROI

Please note.

The Returns should be calculated for a certain period of time, say one fiscal year.

So within these two posts, we’ve given you a great way to assess the ROI of your competitor’s blog. Certainly there are other methods available, but this one should get you started in the right direction.

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It’s no secret that corporations are jumping into blog marketing, some in a fairly big way. As companies devote more resources to their blog marketing program, their opportunities for capturing consumer insights increase directly to the amount of effort devoted.

Competitive Conversation

Blogs, of course, are known for their ability to generate conversations, and conversations among consumers are worth their weight in gold, figuratively speaking certainly as conversations weigh nothing. Traditionally, companies have derived consumer insight from conversations developed in focus groups, and competitors have not been able to eaves drop on those bits of consumer wisdom.

But now, by visiting these corporate blogs, the importance of competitive intelligence may be realized in that you have the ability to “sit in” on these conversations, leveraging your ability to gain strategic insights based on the direction of your competitor’s consumer’s thoughts. Surely, this is not a big secret to those companies already actively engaged in the blogosphere. What might not be realized as readily, however, is the calculable value of the thoughts that consumers share with a competitor. This realization requires an ROI calculation. Return on Investment. ROI. That pesky little concept that keeps poking its head up in meetings, demanding to be recognized, and spoiling all the fun.

Qualitative Evaluation

There are two ways to value the intelligence coming from a review of comments from a competitive blog. One, is to evaluate qualitatively the importance of the competitive intelligence found within the comments.

• What do consumers say that they like about the competitor’s offerings?
• What do consumers say that they hate about the competitor’s offerings?
• What suggestions are they making?
• What product or service features would they like to see changed?

This list could go on. But the point is clear.

There are many methods of determining the answers to these questions. One of the most efficient would be to use some sort of web monitoring software. However, using that type of analysis would require additional information and much, much more knowledge about the competitor, independent of what is revealed within social media. This qualitative analysis would need to be put into the context of the competitor’s overall business environment and markets. By definition, the introduction of this additional information, from sources other than social media, would preclude a strict ROI calculation from the blog alone.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that a competitive ROI can’t be determined for your competitor’s blog marketing effort.

CIP

Cost-improvement program. CIP. Remember those words from some meeting in which you may not have been paying as close attention as perhaps you should have.

A more straightforward way to determine competitive blog ROI is to analyze how much the competitor can be saving on focus group costs. See the figure below.

Blogs have many goals in consumer marketing, but here we’re going to examine just one. The blog goal to be measured, in this example and as previously mentioned, would be to capture consumer insights, to discover new services/products or to find problems with existing services/products. Competitive intelligence is perfectly positioned to determine the returns gained by the competitor in the pursuit of this blog goal.

The measurement in analyzing the achievement of this goal by your competitor would be to track the number of useful comments garnered by the competitive blog. Now, certainly this is an area where the competitive intelligence function would need assistance from marketing. The marketers, with their experience in focus groups, would be able to separate the “wheat from the chaff” in terms of what is a “useful” comment and what is not.

Once the “wheat” is identified, an assessment can be made as to the cost of focus groups needed to gather the same number, and quality, of consumer comments. Where do you get that basic focus group cost info? From your company’s marketers. Most likely, your company’s focus group cost is about the same as that of your competitor. And that cost, a cost avoidance, a CIP, which we’ll call here the expected return on investment, represents the competitive return on the achievement of the consumer insight goal of the blog.

Okay. That covers half of our equation, the return, to determine a ROI for your competitor’s blog. But what about the other half? The investment? That’ll be the subject of our next post on this subject.

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So, I’ve written before about getting in touch with Radian6. And when I did blog about their sluggishness, they caught my feed and responded in less than 36 minutes. Today I’m having another problem contacting them so after emailing several times, I thought I’d just blog. Based on past experience, it might be faster than even calling them on the phone. We’ll see.

Prior to going on vacation last week, I communicated with Radian 6 about setting up a test drive of their system for my duties at work. They said they’d get it going for my first day of return, Monday, July 14. And they did. I got an email from the sales rep at 10AM on the 14th asking if I’d like to to the trial. I said yes. The rep sent me their trial period agreement, which had a piece missing. I wrote back about the missing piece. The rep sent the missing piece, and then I agreed on the morning of the 15th, Tuesday. In one of the email’s on the 14th, the rep said that another Radian6 staffer would actually handle the trial. OK. Fine.

But I haven’t heard from them since, and today is Thursday, the 17th. I even followed up yesterday, the 16th. But still not a word.

Hmmmmm. I really don’t think I should have to work this hard to get a test drive, and potentially hand them my money if I like the way their system feels.

What do you think?

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