Blogging Performance, part 2

After my Blogging Performance post and the subsequent comments, I decided to revise my mission statement as follows: 

Mission: To be a top of mind destination for performance management information and interactive discussions. 

According to my jumpstart methodology (white paper, Webinar), the next step is to consider the four perspectives from the Balanced Scorecard.   In my case, I don’t have any Financial objectives.  I’m not expecting this blog to produce advertising or consulting revenue, or to drive any incremental software revenue to my employer. 

So why do I do it?  Well, for one I’ve always wanted to write the proverbial great American novel but I’m not sure I have the talent or time.  I use professional writing to scratch the itch and hopefully improve my skills.  Writing this blog also forces to me to research and think carefully about performance management; I’m clearly learning more about the topic as a result.  Finally, I have to admit that there’s a certain amount of pride I get when people mention my blog.  It probably even enhances my reputation which can’t help but impact my career.  Interestingly, these objectives are all related to skills and capabilities, which in this case might best go by the original name of learning and growth. 

From the process point of view, I’ve outsourced my infrastructure to wordpress but if issues came up I could bring it in house so it’s worth keeping tracking of response time and uptime.  Perhaps more importantly, my blog is only likely to achieve top of mind status if the content is valuable and updated frequently.  As a result, I need a process objective around timeliness of postings. 

What about the objectives from the customer/reader perspective?  Presumably, you want this blog to be a reliable source of information although I admit that I’m not sure how I’m going to measure that objective.  If I am to achieve my mission, you also need to perceive this as a forum for discussion of PM topics. As a result, the number of comments is a better indicator of performance than the number readers.   

It’s not lost on me that I’ve only listed three perspectives. I struggled to come up with a fourth until I reconsidered my mission statement.  How will I know if I’ve reached top of mind?  Two potential measures are the number of other blogs that link to mine in their blogroll and the number of external posts that mention my posts.  These are measures of Community which, for a blog, seems like a very appropriate fourth perspective.   

As before, I’ll open it up to feedback before going on to KPIs.