The Panel on DIY Media & Measurement included:
- Elisa Camahort founder and queen bee, WorkerBees
- Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, KDPaine & Partners, LLC
- Mark Rogers, CEO, Market Sentinel
Camahort: I think it's hard to track & deal with comments. Someone will come up with that solution. I use delicious right now.
Paine: do this once a month. Not everyday. Look at comments then. Measuring all the time is too cumbersome.
Camahort: Have to correct the impression that blogs are magic. Blogs won't automatically make you buzzy. You have goals & strategies like any other tools. Goals can be subjective & also quantitative.
You really have to spell out expectations and specific steps.
Blogs can be good for SEO, but you have to really use the keywords in the blog. It has to be discussed and worked at explicitly.
Thought leadership. That's a good reason to have a blog. It's not just anecdotal. You can even measure that.
Paine: Define return, define investment. Sometimes an ROI request is a way to say: I don't want to mess with this.
What do you want to measure? Southwest knows exactly what is driving tickets.
Most people don't know why they are doing a blog.
If you want to position yourself as cool, you've got to measusre perceptions. If you want to change relationships, measure those. It's all simple & quantifiable, it just takes effort. The payoff is not justification, but the ability to make better decisions. It's worth the effort to know what is working and what is not working.
The ad value equivalency for a blog doesn't exist. There is no comparison for the old & new media. Nielsen is an 80 year old standard that doesn't apply. There are no auditable figtures for blogs yet.
It's more important to measure failure than it is to measure succsess. You want to know what needs to be fixed. 
Rogers: We map out stakeholders in a given conversation. Then do a long term mathematical analyis about who is authoritative in those conversations. Most compnaies don't punch their weight on the Internet. Ex. Coke's detractors outweigh coke in the google searches. They don't get the Internet.
Search is Brand. --- another white paper.
Google search page is almost your home page.
Search is your brand experience.
The key thing about Dell Hell is that Jarvis drew attention to an underlying issue.
The bloggers who have most authority act like journlaists: cite multiple sources, cite opposting POVs. One-sided complaints tend not to have a long-term influence. The ones that worry brand managers really don't tend to have authority.
Camahort: The prhase: 'blogs are great for Google juice' is sort of like magical thinking. There are specific tactics that have to take place.
You have to read & participate. That's what we mean about getting into the blogosphere.
You have to be very patinet. Do your homework. It's a continuous process that takes a lot of effort. It's not like: give me my blogging strategy and my list of people to pitch.
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