ROI of Blogging from Forrester

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester, presented a Webinar today on the ROI of Blogging. Some of it was basic, at least for those who are at all familiar with corporate blogging, but she is an excellent presenter and made some good points:

-- Successful blog management requires measurement.
-- Recruitment blogs can be a very obvious place for companies to start blogging because hiring is all about reaching out to people -- and that's what blogs are all about.
-- Be honest with yourself about the potential risks your new corporate blog could have and put a risk management plan in place ahead of time.
-- When calculating ROI, remember that blogs have all different purposes (customer service, recruitment, loyalty marketing, product marketing, branding, sales gen, community relations, investor relations, etc.) so you have to start by outlineing your goals before you can measure success.

One note: The Webinar was hosted by Cymfony, a message measurement company which recently received top grades from Forrester's Brand Monitoring Wave report. I'm not saying there is any quid pro quo here, but it seems Forrester is just asking for raised eyebrows when it puts its name next to a company that was a focus of one of its reports. Full disclosure: Factiva Insight was also rated in the same report (and scored less well than Cymfony).