Weighing in on the Conversation Index

I have been meaning to write a post on Stowe Boyd’s Conversation Index for awhile, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to it. Then late last week I read that a media monitoring firm had started using it as a metric to track the amount of conversation a blog entry generates, and now I feel compelled to comment. As background, here’s Stowe Boyd’s description of the Conversation Index that started it all:

“While working at Corante, I had the opportunity to peer at the stats for all sorts of blogs that we had going. And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index, just to put a handle on it.”

I think its fantastic if you want to use the Conversation Index as an internal metric of your own success at generating conversation on your blog. Watch how it changes over time. Compare the ratio of different posts to each other. Go for it.

However, the Conservation Index is not valuable as a universal measure for comparing blogs (and blog posts) to each other. Why? Generally speaking, because measuring the conversation generated by a blog post is a lot more complicated than that. Specifically, because there isn’t a univeral method for dealing with trackbacks and comments. You end up comparing apples to watermelons:

(1) Not all blogs accept comments. And some don’t take trackbacks. Technorati’s most popular blog, Boing Boing, doesn’t allow comments or trackbacks in the traditional sense. Other prominent blogs that don’t take comments include Instapundit (#16), the official Google blog (#11), Andrew Sullivan (#72) and Michelle Malkin (#12). And those are just from memory. How do you accurately show the conversation generated by these influential sites using the Conversation Index?

(2) Some blogs moderate comments and others require registration to comment. I know Micro Persuasion (#69) moderates. I’m sure other popular (and influential) blogs do as well. I’ve also abandoned the idea of leaving comments many times when I was asked to register (Personal Democracy and Doc Searls jump to mind). These tactics employed by bloggers to prevent spam/bad language/thread hijacking lead to less conversation. These kinds of sites will have artificially low ratings.

(3) Different categories of blogs attract different levels of participation. Some blogs ask open ended questions that invite a lot of discussion. Others don’t. Personal blogs often attract more comments than more professionally oriented sites, as Rohit Bhargova of Ogilvy has pointed out. In these cases, the level of conversation (particularly the number of comments) says more about the kind of blog it is than its influence.

There is more I could write. Are comments and trackbacks really of the same value (I place more value on trackbacks)? Aren’t links to an article more important than trackbacks (lots of bloggers don’t use trackbacks)? How do you account for comment and trackback spam? How do you deal with sites that have massive open threads that attract comments about what people had for breakfast?

There are too many holes for this to be used as a universal metric in blog monitoring. At its best, it provides an antecdotal measurement of the amount of conversation generated. At its worst, it could lead a client to a false conclusion about the true impact of a post or blog.

Utlimately, I think measuring the conversation generated by a blog is more complicated than adding a few numbers together. I think Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher got it right in a recent post:

“Finding the right metrics to measure a blog’s value as an influencer will never be as simple as measuring numbers of links, comments, trackbacks, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, etc. Because you have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And you can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline.”

Disclosure: The Bivings Group has its own media monitoring product, ImpactWatch. We don’t use the Conversation Index.

A Look Under the Hood

I’ve spent some time this week micromanaging the relaunch of The Bivings Report (TBR) and as part of the process I’ve been taking a fresh look at various blogging tools and add ons. I figured I’d provide a rundown of what tools we’re using on the off chance its of interest to someone in the process of setting up a blog.

The original version of TBR was custom built in late 2001 by our in-house developers. There were a few blog tools around at the time, but they were pretty primitive so we just built something ourselves. In redoing it, we decided to switch to WordPress after investigating all the usual suspects. We chose WordPress because it has almost all the functionality we wanted built in, has a robust set of accompanying plugins, is highly customizeable and utilizes our preferred programming language/platform. Its also free.

We used this plugin to create the weighted display of categories we are using to classify posts. We decided to run our RSS feed through feedburner to make it easier for people to subscribe. And we ended up using BlogBeat to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that will surely start flocking to revamped The Bivings Report. In the future we may add a listing of Digg stories and/or maintain a list interesting bookmarks on del.icio.us.

Anyway, let us know if you’ve heard of anything cool.

Lincoln IABC Presentation

For those of you who would like a copy of the PowerPoint from the Lincoln IABC Blogging presentation, please email me at fgb@bivings.com.

The Bivings Report Gets a Facelift

The Bivings Report started out in late 2001 as a blog that focused exclusively on online marketing and promotion. The site built a loyal following over the years, but the content we were publishing only reflected a small part of what we do. So we’ve redesigned the site and are going to try to talk about all the things we are passionate about. Its an exciting time for the Internet and The Bivings Group as a firm, and we want to write about it.

Note that we wrote a lot of articles for The Bivings Report over the years. We loaded those into the site archive since some people might find them interesting/useful. We deleted most of our old posts since they tended to function as links to the news of the day.