The answer to the question in the title will hopefully be yes, but it probably depends on who you’re asking. It also depends what they consider a “good blog post”; in other words they all have different measures of success. The same is true with any Web site or online project.
Measures of success obviously can vary from project to project, but they can also vary within a project. In most cases there exist three levels of measures, for our purposes we’ll call them primary, secondary and tertiary.
Usually primary measures of success relate to an offline activity. Although some people may spend more time in front of a computer than away from it, there is still a real world out there – a world that revolves around exchanging money, voting, construction and other human activities. Thus some examples would include making a donation on a mobile phone, getting people to vote for a particular candidate, or winning approval for a new hospital. One or more of these are usually the “problems” a client will have when looking to partner with another firm. These are easily the most important measures of success.
Secondary measures have to do with the activities that lead to one of the primary objectives mentioned above. Since primary measures involve a serious commitment on the part of the end-user, a gradual process of building up to the ultimate goal is required. These nodes of engagement could include participating in an online poll or survey, posting a message on a Facebook Wall, or forwarding an email.
The way to judge the likelihood that the secondary actions will be taken by supporters remains the hard data of the tertiary measures. These indexes – like pageviews, open rates or Twitter followers – are the things successful managers follow on a daily basis; and their analysis will uncover trends among your audiences. This will in turn allow you to optimize campaigns to drive up the response rates measured in the primary and secondary goals.
Taking a step back we have seen that measures of success directly correlate to a campaign goal. Measuring those goals can be done on a variety of levels in this case primary, secondary, or tertiary. These levels could also be called Offline, Engagement, and Indicators, respectively.
The goal of this post was to pass on some knowledge for the offline world, I hope it is measured as a success.
