My own field observations of Blyopia (see Part I - including Bob's comment and my retort) indicate that the condition seems to spread more easily among people with a need to appear "hard-nosed" and "business-focused."

These are often the same ones locked into the instant-gratification, quarterly report mentality that requires numerical results that THEY can take credit for NOW!

To me, they're just hard-headed and short-sighted: their focus on the trees (short-term results) prevents them from seeing the forest (the long-term health and success of their business).

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In Bob Bly's case, I noted in Part I that his criticisms of blogs as a business tool focuses on comparing them to his own field of expertise: direct marketing sales campaigns. In the first place, Bob's confidence that his ability to measure things like click-throughs, responses, and conversions equates directly to ROI is itself open to question.

A serious problem with insisting on measurement is that it makes you dependent on only those factors you selectively chose to measure and forces you to ignore things that we don't yet know how to measure -- regardless of how crucial to success those things may have become.

Consider this hypothetical example from Andy Sernovitz's new book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking -

These days, all marketers are obsessed with measuring results, so let's do some math (actually some story problems).

. . .Check It Out

Problem #3. We pay for an email campaign to one million opt-in (we hope) email addresses. we get 1 percent click-throughs, and close 10 percent of them, giving us 1,000 new customers.

But 10,000 people don't remember opting in. So they get angry and decide never to buy from us again. And they each tell five friends that we spammed them. Two thousand of those [50,000] people were current clients who are now mad at us. And they each tell five friends.

How many prospects do we lose forever? Was the potential lifetime value of these customers greater than the new accounts we acquired? What is the lost revenue from current customers who left because they think we are spamming? What happens when people start blogging that we spammed them?

In the hypothetical, the direct marketer chose to measure click-throughs and conversions. The measured results might look impressive. But the long-term impact on the company would be harmful.

But putting aside for the moment such unintended consequences of the measurement obsession in general, or direct marketing in particular, if blogs were designed or meant to be used primarily as a sales tool for generating immediate response purchases, then Bob's criticisms might have some validity. We should not be willing to allow those with Blyopia to frame the question so narrowly.

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