Stats don't always tell the full story. (image by KevinzHengli)

Thank you for the feedback on both our logo and sharing of stats. We wanted to highlight this comment from Kelly from Kelly’s Lucky You:

Now, the third one, yeah, it’s fun but it doesn’t tell me who you are! When I looked up synonyms for “beta”, I got “dubious, experimental, flaky, mostly working, new, pre-release, suspect, testing, unready”

The beta comment is a great point. What does Beta mean to us? Beta means we are testing the platform with a few bloggers and promoters to ensure a few things:

• The platform is easy to us for both bloggers and promoters
• That helps connect both bloggers and promoters and provides equal value to both
• Third that it makes the web a better place.

It’s our goal to get out of Beta as quick as possible.

On Bloggers and Stats

As a blogger myself I know how a blog can play a role into your daily life. While every blogger has their own personal reasons for blogging at the core it comes down to having something to say. If you have enough interesting things to say and can entertain people will begin to follow you. Thus you gain an audience– this is what promoters are really looking for.

I do think it’s important to remember that promoters have limited resources and limited products to give away. So when they look at the landscape of bloggers they are asking themselves what is the best way for us to get the word out? They are really looking for what is called the vocal minority–finding a small subset of a market and making them aware of their product or service. As a blogger you fit into this vocal minority (or at least that’s the hope from a promoters standpoint).

Stats Don’t Tell the Full Picture

So on one hand stats are important but on the other they aren’t. How are stats not necessarily important? As a blogger or even someone engaging in a social network you have a level of influence. With certain stats like Facebook fans, Twitter followers, RSS and newsletter subscribers you can gauge at least some form of reach or audience. While that does sow some level of influence that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Take two bloggers who blog with the same consistency. They both have Twitter accounts. Blogger one has 3,000 followers and blogger two has 200. Objectively you could say Blogger one has the most influence and audience. But that is not the full story–when you look deeper Blogger one is using Twitter to really push communications whereas blogger two is truly engaging with a good percentage of her 200 followers. Also one of her followers writes for her local paper and often includes ideas she gets from the blogger in her columns. Blogger one really is not interacting and thus doesn’t have influence over her audience.

So Who Has More Influence?

The other aspect of influence is among your peers, friends and family. This is where numbers don’t always tell the full picture.  If you take Blogger two she might influence 6-8 of her friends on Facebook that never show up on some statistic. We bring this up just to explain a little more on how stats do play into how a promoter views your blog and your efforts. Sometimes we get so caught up on numbers that we don’t dig deep and say what is really going on.Also with Blogger two and the newspaper writer this is a form of what we call influencer of the influencer. One person influences someone who has a larger audience but you would never know that without knowing the connection between the two. There is no stat I know of that is going to tell you this influence effect.

In the end a promoter is looking for a blogger to review their product and give an honest assessment of it’s feature and uses. They also are hoping that in reviewing the product the people that you influence will either purchase or continue the conversation around their product.

Does This Help?

We wanted to share a little more on why stats are important but also why they are not. Yes we know kind of like answering a question with a question. This is important because not only do we want you the blogger to have success we also want a promoter to understand the value of engaging and interacting with all levels of bloggers on Tomoson.

Is this post helpful? Should we do more posts like this where we go a little deeper into the aspects of both promotions and blogging?

Movie Quote: “Surely you can’t be serious!”…  “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”

bloggers · influence · promoters · social media · stats