This workshop was presented by the very dynamic Avinash Kaushik. Avinash really set up the story well, in that measurement of traffic doesn’t work anymore (”google analytics only gives you a slice“). He spoke about know you need many different measurement tools to measure success of a blog and in general of online presence because the way content is distributed is radically changed. So, it is now much more challenging to measure engagement online, because there is no one tool that does it all.

Big lesson: Blog audiences build gradually, just because you make it to the top of Digg, doesn’t mean you are going to stay there. A regular audience grows gradually. He considers FeedBurner subscribers to be the most loyal, because they allow him to push content to them.

He is a unique blogger in that he writes long posts, not a lot of posts. His purpose is to write about complex things in an easily understood way, so for him, the conversational aspect of blogging is a key to his success — meaning, do people comment? His commenters write more words than he does (interesting).

He talked about Technorati Rank as relatively useless, because it is too general by putting every blogger in the same bucket. Here’s how I think about it.

Measures of influence are subjective — they depends on who the audience is. If you’re blogging about sports — about hockey — does it really matter if your Technorati Rank is really low? No, because if you have a large audience interested in hockey that’s engaged in a conversation with you (comments, links to your posts, etc), that’s the true measure of your authority and/or influence in the topic of hockey.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics //