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Easter break + more or less nice weather = travel time!? If you were lucky you might have spend some days away from home. Wouldn’t it be a strange idea if every step of this journey would have been observed by someone? I think so. But there is one particular journey on which it can be very beneficial to keep an eye. Any idea? I think about the customer’s journey on a corporate website.

Web analytics tools like Google analytics, Omniture, Hitwise and Web Trends make it possible to track what is going on on a corporate website or corporate blog. This is especially helpful if the target of an online PR campaign is to drive traffic to these websites. The web analytics tools make it easy to identify where the traffic came from, for instance.

Keyword: online evaluation

But analyzing a corporate website is just one thing – the online environment provides other interesting opportunities to evaluate the success of PR work, too, of course! Just think about blogs, for instance: Regarding the corporate blog you can easily get an idea of how many people are engaging with the company by looking at the frequency of comments. Counting the volume of conversations, comments and track backs to the corporate blog is one option to evaluate it. Another possibility is ‘The Conversation Index’ developed by Stowe Boyd. This index measures the degree to which a blog generated conversation. Additionally bookmarking sides like Technorati or Kineda are helpful tools to measure a blog as the rank blogs according to their popularity.

The challenge of the online environment

Doubtlessly, the online environment gives versatile chances to measure online PR activity. The mentioned tools are just one part of an interesting, new working field (if you’d like to get a deeper insight into it, why not read my fellow student Jennifer’s or Sam’s blog). Nevertheless, I think it is important to keep in mind that the exploration of the online world requires a large dose of common sense, a structured approach and enough knowledge of the technologies that are available to help, too!

Anyway, I’ll set off for another virtual journey now! If I get across interesting PR topics, I will let you know, for sure!

Did you know that London has got a premier blogging pigeon? You don’t? No problem at all! To be honest, I haven’t heard of it, too, until I started planning a trip to the city some time ago. I came over the ‘Pigeon Blog’ by chance while searching for insider tips about London. Since then I can’t get the interesting idea of a blogging pigeon out of my head.

So who is ‘London’s premier blogging pigeon’? His name is Brian Pigeon. He’s living in Soho, on Beak Street, right above Bistro 1. “Soho Square’s a great place to hang too, especially in the summer. Bread bits everywhere. Heaven for the pigeon”, he says in an interview published at www.londonist.com. But what the hell does a pigeon blog about? ‘The infamous Brian of Pigeon Blog fills us in on everything from why London rocks, what’s up with the squirrels and what happens when the pigeons party in Piccadilly Circus‘. Marvelous! I love the idea of describing London through the eyes of a pigeon in a blog! Reading Brian Pigeon’s blog was a funny variety while searching for tips for my trip. Incidentally I got information about the city, too, that were different from those repeating voices about London you find all over the web on official travel websites.

Besides the stories about London the pigeon blog tries to entertain with some pigeon videos, too. To my mind, the content is better than the videos, but that’s a matter of taste.

Tell your story

The pigeon blog is an interesting example for the nature of blogs: Blogs are written by somebody who is passionate about a specific topic and wants to tell the world about it. The blog of Brian Pigeon is an unusual one, of course – but does this matter? Yes, he’s claims to be a genuine urban pigeon describing the life of pigeon’s in London – but still, he’s an independent voice in the blogosphere, too. And as you can see from my trip-example, bloggers – whoever they are – became an valuable and important alternative source for information nowadays (I came across some other interesting blogs and unofficial websites about London, too. Check them out, if you plan a trip to London:, ‘diamondgreezer’, ‘london underground’,‘london.thewayweseeit’, ‘londonist’,londonreviewofbreakfasts’, ‘kudocities london’, ‘derelictlondon’etc.).

Blogs – a viable channel for corporate communications

But not only think about all the individual bloggers, like Brian Pigeon, who make their voice heard in the internet. Think about corporate blogs, too: Blogging can be an incredible tool for a company, e.g. to reach and inform customers, to generate talk about a product or the company as a whole and to build goodwill. While investing little – as a blogs are simple to set up – companies can establish strong and interactive communication directly with the customer (By the way, I really love the following truthful quote of David Meerman Scott: “If you can use Microsoft Word or successfully buy a product online from Amazon, you have enough technical skills to blog.”). Based on my own experiences as a customer I’m convinced that customers profit from the increased access to dialogue, too: Isn’t it a good thing to get more useful information and support from a company, for example?

Surely, blogs can be used in different ways by companies. I’d like to point out ‘The Three Uses of Blogs for Marketing and PR’ by David Meerman Scott (‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyers directly’):

1. To easily monitor what millions of people are saying about you, the market you sell into, your organization and its products.
2. To participate in those conversations by commenting on other people’s blog.
3. To begin to shape those conversations by creating and writing your own blog.

You see, there are good reasons for companies to enter the blogosphere (read more about corporate blogs at Brian Solis’blog e.g. post a) post b))! And never underestimate a blogger like Brian Pigeon – a voice is a voice, no matter who it is belonging to: it can shape the conversation about a company! Think about this excerpt from the above mentioned interview with Brian Pigeon: “How and why did you start blogging? I started the whole thing as a bit of a laugh really. Just the day-to-day doings of a London pigeon. Never thought it would catch on. To be honest, I wasn’t sure anyone was going to be that interested in a pigeon’s point of view. Just goes to show. Jesus. Last year I even got into the Time Out Top 50 London websites, and all I do is go on about stuff we pigeons get up to. Amazing, really.” Indeed!

Do you like to get a deeper insight into corporate blogs? Check the following links to get an idea how different companies set up their blog:

McDonald’s corporate social responsibility blog

Wells Fargo Blogs

Microsoft Community Blogs

Hewlett-Packard employee business blogs

Sun employee blog