I found out about this post on Paul Greenberg's blog, through one of our customer bloggers, Mark Mangano. Paul quotes Brent Leary, who used this cool tool which uses honest to goodness chicken entrails to calculate how much a blog is worth. Running the numbers, Brent figured that the Salesforce blog is only worth $3,387.24, coming way behind the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team blog, who scored a mean $10,726.26. Touche.

Why did we fare so poorly? Actually, we didn't. Brent used the current Successforce.com home page as the touchstone of our worth. What he didn't realize that we are in the process of transitioning from an older website called CRMSuccess.com, which obviously holds the most Google juice among our properties. So I decided to do the same evaluation, only using the old addresses. Once all our redirects from the old property to the new start working, all the Google juice stored in the old addresses will come pouring into the new property, so this is a fair assumption to make. Without further ado, the valuation:

1. blog.crmsuccess.com: $17,500.74
2. blogs.salesforce.com: $6,209.94

So we are in fact worth $23,710.68. Not Weblogs Inc, but not bad huh? Now here's how we'll grow that number.

Our blog strategy is to create a long tail of specialized blogs cross promoting content by extensive linking. We expect this process to produce a good social filter and commentary for the content they will create. We are also working on creating a more open blog ecosystem with our customer bloggers. Hell, I even linked to a competitor's blog earlier in this post.

We want to create blogs for every product, each managed by a group of people. A lot of our bloggers are trying it for the first time, so a group provides both, support as well as a higher frequency of posting. Here's a list of current Salesforce blogs:

• The Official Salesforce Blog
  
• The AppExchange Blog
  
• AppExchange Developers
  
• AppExchange Mobile Blog
  
• Ask Wendy
• Partner Success
  
• Reporting and Dashboards
  
• Salesforce for Google AdWords Blog
  
• Service and Support
  
• Successforce Blog

Now, some of these are really new and are just testing the waters, so it will be a while before this becomes more full blown. But we are committed to being open and transparent, and we are very serious about blogging.

And before we leave, here's another stat that I think is meaningful, because it's a good indicator of early adopter interest: feed subscriber numbers. We've been on a steady rise there since Dreamforce last year, and we now have over 400 subscribers, at least 300 of whom read the feed everyday.

What we could do a lot better on is comments. It's true that many of our readers are only here to have their problems solved, but it would be nice to have them participate as well. I think we need to make our posts more open ended, but I'll welcome any ideas in that department.