Last week we executed a livebog on behalf of the Human Capital Institute (for tips on liveblogging see Now Is Gone). The goals of the National Human Capital Institute liveblog were:

1. Serve membership with a live accounting of the event, extend the Summit experience beyond attendees
2. Determine the membership’s interest in social media products.
3. Get content from the blog embedded in the search engines
4. Begin using social media tools and socialize them within the Human Capital Institute

Unfortunately, because we were using wordpress.com as  sand box, we were limited in the plug-ins and metrics we could deploy (HCI is actively building a blog on its site for future efforts). Therefore, some of our analysis is estimated based on prior experiences.

In just a short two weeks, the National Human Capital Institute liveblog generated 4,851 page views.  Usually a blog will generate 1.4-1.8 page views per visit. Dividing our page views by 1.6, we get 3032 visits, and if we were to provide an estimated range the blog hosted approximately 2700-3400 visitors.  On its best day, March 11 (day two of the summit), the blog received 1985 page views or between 1100 - 1400 visitors.

How many of these visitors were repeat visits? An established, mature blog may experience a 55-60 percent new visitor ratio, and a rapidly growing blog may experience a 70 percent new visit ratio. This however was brand new blog, we conservatively estimate that  80 percent of visits were new, with the remaining 20 percent being folks revisiting the site for updates. That puts unique visitors at 2160 to 2720, or approximately 2440.

What about Google?

In addition to Google juice, you can see the blog sparked other conversations. You can track those conversations here on Technorati. All in all, including trackbacks the comment ratio was 1 (24 posts, 24 comments and trackbacks), not great, but this may be a function of the blog being brand new.

Finally, in addition to my blogging, I was joined by Amanda Craig from HCI.  Amanda picked-up WordPress skills very quickly, demonstrating that it was a tool that could be easily adopted by the HCI team.

Conclusions

The end results were overall very, very strong. There’s clearly a need for such information in the social media marketplace. As a result, the Human Capital Institute should proceed with several new social media initiatives over the next few months.

In my mind this also proves the value of blogging as short term, precision communications tool.  While 2450 visitors is not 24,500 visitors, they are extremely targeted… The right 2500, comprising HCI’s membership and the extended talent management/human resources marketplace.  Getting them to voluntarily visit HCI is a huge plus.

You want ROI? At the same time, HCI saw a large uptick in webinar registrations for its best week so far this year. It’s not a coincidence that it was actively engaging its constituents socially at the same time.