Measuring the micro media of today is a big challenge. For marketers there is this ever pertinent challenge of how to measure mediums like blogs, wikis and podcasts.

With Social Media Channels like blogs and podcasts, the traditional metrics of reach and frequency won’t work, and more often than not, you will have to justify by qualitative metrics at best. So here I attempt to highlight the right metrics for marketers. And hope that user generated content is monetized in a way that it is worthy of.

I have always thought that podcasts and blogs need to be monetized- in a way that is appropriate. I think one major hurdle to achieve that objective is marketers ignorance. Another one is the content creators incapacity to market themselves well. But that is another story. The main issue is the lack of standards and ignorance. Chicken and egg situation actually. Usually problems like this wait for ’scale’ to be solved. Marketers scramble for answers only when the right scale is achieved.

I just put together a podcast series on www.chasingthestorm.com and attempt to put together a set of metrics and parameters to analyze podcasts. What better way to put up an analysis through the medium itself. Hence a podcast to analyze podcasts.

There actually is going to be a series of webisodes on this one topic- three to be exact. Following which, we will have other topics- hopefully some suggested by you.

To take a perspective- I am going to analyze three of my favorite podcasts from Singapore.

I analyze them on the basis of their

• Web "weightage" (Page Rank),
  
• Blog buzz (inbound links from other blogs),
  
• Buzz within the podcast channel (Comment to webisode post ratio),
  
• Frequency of posts, and average time per podcast.
• And of course I will be covering some qualitative criterion as well
  

Not perfect. But in the absence of any other criterion- should give you a reasonably good insight rather than go by gut feel. Or worse- scrap spending on this media at all- because there are no parameters or justifications.

In the first podcast of this series- I cover a technology podcast/videocast by a bunch of young lads. Some details and how they fare on each of the above highlighted parameters.

Do let me know what are the other things that interest you- in case you are marketer or a content creator. Meanwhile, I get down to creating some more content and putting in more distribution channels for the podcast. Can only get better with time. Till then- Enjoy!

Shalabh Pandey

ChasingTheStorm