Scoble on blogging and ROI:

The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.

Where I gave them stuff like " blogging doubled sales at Stormhoek winery, according to its CEO." Or "Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya, says blogging is very important to his new company." Or "Axosoft raised more than $14,000 in just a few days with nothing more than a few links on some blogs." Or " Foldera got more than one million signups for its service in 17 days by doing nothing more than talking to six bloggers." Or, a tailor in the UK saw his sales go up by 10x by doing a blog. That probably wasn't well enough communicated, or it wasn't the kind of answer that would convince Werner. That means I need to go back and do some more homework or at least learn to communicate better while being interrupted by an executive with strongly formed opinions.

Here's the thing - you won't be able to find "hard numbers" for blogging and ROI. Not now, probably not ever. How many hard numbers do you find for any CRM effort? That's what blogging is, really - Customer (or Prospect) relationship mangement. It's a way to communicate with a wider audience than you can via more traditional marketing outreach efforts. Have we ever found solid ROI numbers for those more traditional efforts? I don't think so - best I can tell, we try to track down initial leads that came via marketing, and then marketing takes credit for anything that's even remotely related to a marketing campaign.

I'm not trying to knock marketing efforts with that. It's just that marketing is very hard to measure objectively. Sales is easier - either a sales person did or did not close a sale. At the end of the year, there's a real number to look at, and there are previous years to compare to. Sure, it's still a little fuzzy, because sales gets impacted by things out of their control. My point is, marketing measurements are even less objective, and I don't really see a way to firm them up. Which takes me back to blogging. It's another aspect of customer/prospect outreach, and - for all the same reasons - hard to get solid numbers for.