News from New Comm -
Forrester's Principal Analyst Charlene Li gave the Friday morning keynote at the New Communications Forum in Palo Alto on March 3.
As reported by Debbie Weil over at BlogWrite for CEOs, in a post entitled So what's Charlene Li's ROI on blogging?, Charlene told the audience that her blog "triggered $1 million in new business for Forrester last year."
Stop and think about that for a moment.
A MILLION DOLLARS in new business!
Now, we might question Debbie's calculation of the ROI as 5000%, basing it only on the annual cost of her Typepad account at $180 (as Debbie herself did). One of her commenters pointed out that Charlene's time would likely be considered part of Forrester's investment.
But heck, let's assume it costs Forrester $250,000 to have Charlene around and say she spends a whopping 20% of her work time on blogging. That would put the investment at $50,180 - and cut the percentage return down to a measly 1893%.
[$1,000,000 - $50,180 = $949,820; $949,820/$50,180 = 18.928, which rounds to 1893%. Like Debbie, I'm happy to be corrected, if my simple ROI calculation is in error. My guess is no matter how you slice it, the return of $1,000,000 on one blogger's effort is going to be spectacular.]
If you're still wondering where the "return" on blogging comes from, invest a half hour and watch Charlene's free online video of her presentation Social Computing - Bubble or Big Deal?
The ROI on that half hour could be spectacular for you, too.
More at Charlene's blog post from last October 24.
Or, consider the value to GM of Vice Chairman Bob Lutz' FastLane blog conversation with GM customers "on how we can change people’s perceptions about our company, and our new cars and trucks." He's responding to some 300 comments and ideas from customers and his March 6 post has already produced 110 more comments in six days.
What's that kind of direct interaction between top management and customers worth?
One other minor quibble with Debbie Weil's post is it's title: the return is Forrester's, not Charlene's. Take a look at Charlene's blog. Its "title" is Charlene Li's Blog (you can search it that way and, as of today, that's what you'll find in its html source code in its title tag). As an aside, I thought I recalled a prior version that actually displayed the title as "Charlene Li's Blog," but if I'm right, it's been deleted from the Wayback Machine. If Charlene, or anyone else has a copy of an earlier look, it ought to be preserved as part of blogging's history.
But now the banner and the URL are pure "corporate" Forrester:
http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli
For a million bucks in new business, why not?
(And, of course, her blog doesn't hurt Charlene's personal brand, either.)
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