Conversation check

ComMetrics Resonance Check is a composite index made up of the:

=> Conversation check (you are here), Consistency check, and the Ripple effect indices.

During Feburary 2006, Stowe Boyd pointed out that backlinks, traffic and more:

“…are relatively crude measures, and don’t adequately measure the level of interactivity going on at blogs,

His suggestion was the Conversational Index with which one measures the number of (posts/comments + trackbacks).

Avinash Kaushik wrote Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success where he suggested as one of the six measures the following:

Conversation Rate = Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

We use a slightly different approach since we believe the comments are most important in this calculation because:

1) Some links may show up in Technorati or Yahoo BackLinks. Unfortunately, for whatever reason they might not turn up in your blog as a TrackBack.
One explanation could be that your blog or another blog does not have outbound TrackBack enabled.
2) A TrackBack does not stimulate conversation by readers on your site but possibly somewhere else. This might not be in your best interest either.

For these and some other reasons we use:

Conversation Index = [number of comments (excluding trackbacks or pingbacks) / number of posts]

How it works
We calculate the index as follows. For instance, ComMetrics.com had 9 comments (excluding trackbacks or ping backs) and 5 posts during the month of November:

(9/5) = a Conversation ratio of 1.8 for November 08

Besides the monthly based data as shown above to explain our concept better, we also use:

– weekly
– monthly (default)
– quarterly, and
– annual scores

In turn, comparisons can be made visualizing the trends for your blog as well as those you are comparing yourself against.