Keep your finger on the audience pulse
Scott Kirsner of the San Jose Mercury News wrote about the inescapable fascination of keeping tabs on your readers (On the Web, audience size matters, May 27, 2007):
Andy Plesser, a public relations executive who publishes a video blog called Beet.tv, checks a Web page several times throughout the day that shows information about which other sites are sending visitors his way. “I look at it first thing in the morning, at the office during client calls, and before I go to sleep,” he says, via e-mail. “More alarmingly, I have it bookmarked on my BlackBerry, and I find myself hitting refresh repeatedly.” Plesser confesses to checking his stats even while he’s in the car commuting to work (only when it’s stopped, he insists).
Most people who have been blogging for more than, say, a month have — like Plesser — discovered the addictive properties of free stats software such as StatCounter, SiteMeter and Google Analytics. As Kirsner wrote, it’s “easy to see how readers are finding you — which other Web sites are linking to those popular posts — and to keep tabs on which posts generate the most comments from readers.”
It doesn’t matter if the audience is teensy-tiny — most bloggers will find their site stats irresistible.
[Guy] Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley author and entrepreneur whose blog, “How to Change the World,” shows up at No. 21 on Technorati’s list of the most influential blogs. He contends that all bloggers care about metrics, no matter how well-known or obscure. Via e-mail, he quips, “There are two kinds of bloggers: those that obsess about their Technorati rankings, and those that lie and say they don’t.”
I’m wondering whether the journalist bloggers (the ones who write a blog as part of their staff newsroom job) are fanatically checking their stats. I hope so!
(Found via the Social Media blog.)
Technorati tags: audiences | blogging | metrics | online journalism | online media
I’m wondering how many journalists who write employer-hosted blogs even have access to decent stats. Some places keep that stuff locked up as though they were nuclear launch codes, or else offer little more than total page views. No unique visits, PVs per visit, length of visit, geo location, etc. Ridiculous. You can’t, or at least shouldn’t, blog blind!
May 30, 2007 at 8:47 pmThat’s kinda what I was thinking — it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to blog if I couldn’t see the detailed stats. I have heard that different newsrooms have widely varying policies on releasing stats to their journalists.
May 30, 2007 at 11:23 pm