Stowe Boyd, author of the /Message blog, has come up with something he calls the Conversation Index. It's a simple calculation of the ratio between the number of posts on a blog vs the number of comments. If your ratio is less than one, that means that you have a real dialog going on. More people are listening to you and engaging in your conversation than you are posting. Of course most of us newbies would be hopelessly over 1 but I think it brings up a very good point. If our objectives in creating blogs are to create dialog, you need to measure the dialog. We've been encouraging our clients to measure comments and TrackBacks, not just the tone of postings, and Boyd's concept totally reinforces this argument and provides a neat way to package it. As always, you become what you measure. So if you measure your CI, presumably you will see what works and doesn't work to engage your readers, then modify your postings accordingly and demonstrate improvement over time.


Like Kami said.
Posted by: Stowe Boyd | February 16, 2006 at 08:35 PM
He actually later inverted the eaquation so that the higher your rating the better. But my concern is that you also need to measure the quality of the trackbacks and comments. Some are spam, and some don't add much to the conversation.
Posted by: Kami Huyse | February 16, 2006 at 03:49 PM