Biz Blog Review in Backbone Blogging Survey

Recently I discovered that John Cass, Director of Blogging Strategies for Backbone Media, linked to my "Blog Evaluation Strategy" in April, in a post -- Assessing Whether You Should Blog.

Here is the link: http://blogsurvey.backbonemedia.com/archives/2006/04/assessing_wheth.html

Cass includes the following points on conducting a blogging assessment for your company:

1) Company Goals: Start off by writing down your company goals; list your PR, Communications and SEO goals. Understanding your goals will help you to determine if blogging is a strategy that will help you to achieve your overall marketing goals.

2) Outcomes: Develop a list of outcomes that will be produced by starting a blog. Base the outcomes on the your assessment of your industry's blogging community, the ability of your company to blog and what's happening with your competition. List traffic potential, which goals you expect to achieve through a blogging strategy and how you expect your industry's blogosphere to develop.

3) Keywords: Research the keywords that will help you to target your audience for search engines and RSS feed search engines.

4) Blog Audit: Develop a list of bloggers in your community. Assess each blogger's level of influence and impact.

5) Blogosphere Profile: Take the themes being discussed in your community's blogosphere and assess how your company can enter into the discussion. What unique characteristics about your product/service will elicit discussion and demonstrate leadership.

6) Blog Costs: Describe how much time will it take to blog. Assess the cultural norms of interaction within your community; for example do bloggers send trackbacks. Estimate the costs of not blogging against the dangers of blogging for your company.

7) Justification for the blog: What results will the blog produce, estimate the traffic, SEO results and PR outcomes. Use these results for your CEO presentation.

8) Commit or pull the plug: Review your research and based on the overview give a fair estimate of whether your company should blog or not blog.

John Cass provides Internet marketing, SEO and corporate blogging advice to clients. His biography is available on his personal business blog: http://pr.typepad.com/about.html