I've been blogging since August 2009.  It's a continuous learning experience that's all about trial and error.  That process goes beyond understanding what content people find interesting and includes figuring out a writing process for ideas, setting weekly writing goals, experimenting with the TypePad blogging interface, registering a domain name for this blog (sometimes to great frustration, but that's the topic of a future blog post), and getting better at promoting my blog to more people than just my wife.

On a daily basis, I study the Google Analytics results that measure traffic for Social Media ReInvention Blog (even though I already know the traffic volume is small — Ha!).  For now, I'm okay with that because my 12 month goal is to continue learning how to improve my blog's content and promotion.

The starting point for all improvement is measurement.  One of my favorite professors in business school, the late Dean Kropp (and a great guy too), passionately shared the following mantra about operational strategy to me and his students: "What Gets Measured is What Gets Done."  Those words continue to have a lasting influence on me.

For Tina Brown, one of the reasons she measures and evaluates The Daily Beast's performance is because her primary investor, Barry Diller, wants to know how his investment is performing.  She didn't go into specific detail about how they measure ROI at The Daily Beast, but it's clear they're implementing metrics.  Here's what I took away from Tina Brown's keynote address regarding performance measurement.

Learning #1 Employ Metrics that Increase Your Organization's Competitive Advantage
According to Tina Brown, The Daily Beast books ~59 television appearances per month for its contributing writers.  In addition, she estimates that ~30,000 blogs link to The Daily Beast per month!

It's very telling that Brown mentioned her love of working with talented writers. She remarked how so many people have so much to say, but they lack a credible and visible forum to voice their views.  There's no question Tina Brown wants The Daily Beast to become the writer-driven forum of choice.

My rationale for that opinion: The Daily Beast measures and promotes metrics showing why a talented writer professionally benefits from The Daily Beast's reach and exposure.  Tracking and espousing these outcomes gives The Daily Beast a competitive advantage in attracting outstanding writing talent.  If you're a writer searching for an influential and visible forum to expose your ideas/opinions, these metrics demonstrate why The Daily Beast is a compelling professional destination.

Learning #2 Evaluate How Specific Audiences Interact and Engage with Your Content
It sounded like Tina Brown and The Daily Beast are trying to measure audience engagement via a process similar to BusinessWeek.com's current audience engagement initiative (i.e., ratio of writer output to reader input and segmented by topic, author, etc.).  If you'd like to learn more, here's a link to the August 2009 eConsultancy interview with John Byrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com. 

Brown believes authentically engaged readers "participate in the day's conversation."  I agree because engaged Web 2.0 participants (or is that now Web 3.0) exhibit engagement through measurable social media behaviors. 

In my opinion, a back-of-the-envelope list of these measurable social media behaviors could include but are not limited to:

* Tweeting or retweeting specific article links on Twitter
* Writing blog posts inspired by a specific topic (like this one)
* Document content links in those blog posts (e.g., inbound links)
* Sharing content through social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and Stumble Upon
* Uploading and distributing the selected content via YouTube or Vimeo
* Sharing content and cataloging it in URL shortening services like bit.ly
* Posting discussion questions or opinions about the content in LinkedIn Discussion Forums (and the member comments these questions or opinions generate)