The Conversational Index for blogs
Microsoft Emerging Business Team — The Conversational Index for blogs — Stowe Boyd has introduced the notion of a Conversational Index to measure the effectiveness of blogs. I agree completely with Stowe on this.
Context & Ripple Effects
The day before this post, Stowe Boyd laid out the Conversational Index on Message: a blog's value is the ratio of comments and trackbacks it earns per post written, not its traffic or link count. Don Dodge, writing for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, is the notable corporate voice signing on — he says he agrees completely with Boyd's framing.
That matters because Microsoft's startup-facing team has an interest in which blogs actually move markets, and the endorsement lands amid broader questions about whether firms belong in the blogosphere at all — the question HBS Working Knowledge took up in November 2005 in Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?. A Microsoft evangelist adopting a conversation metric is one answer: blog only if you are prepared to converse.
First-order effects
- Corporate and VC bloggers now have a named benchmark — Boyd's conversational ratio — that judges them on replies per post, putting broadcast-style executive blogs on notice.
- Boyd's newly launched blog gains immediate credibility from a Microsoft Emerging Business Team endorsement, accelerating pickup of the metric beyond his own readership.
Second-order effects
- Bloggers who accept the index must restructure their output around provoking replies, shifting effort from publishing volume to cultivating the comment threads that raise their score.
- Measurement vendors and feed tools face demand to count conversations — comments and trackbacks per post — rather than pageviews, since the metric is meaningless without tracking.
Third-order effects
- If conversation ratios become the accepted yardstick, blog investment decisions inside companies get tied to demonstrated dialogue rather than audience size, pressuring low-engagement corporate blogs to close or change format.
- The pattern points toward engagement-per-post becoming the general unit of social media value, with platforms and advertisers eventually standardizing on interaction metrics over raw reach.
The trend: Blog measurement is shifting from traffic counts to per-post conversation ratios as corporate blogging matures from broadcasting into dialogue.