Looking for blogs
Before I began sending people info on the survey, I searched for corporate blogs. I spent over a week just looking for blogs. At first I thought there would be thousands upon thousands, but at this point, I've only found about 900. Out of those 900, about 600 were the blogs of Microsoft employees. A large percentage of the Microsoft company blogs were actually inactive and had been that way for at least four months. But some were very active.
I don't know why I assumed there would be so many more blogs, but I guess it makes sense since blogging is a relatively new thing; corporate blogging is even newer. I think that in the next year more companies will have blogs and perhaps by then they'll even be standard in certain types of industry websites.
It made me wonder if there are more corporate blogs out there that I just can't find. Maybe some of them aren't showing up on Google, and are not linked to by other blogs, etc.
Posted by kristine at 4:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005When does the survey close?
Meryl in a recent comment had asked "I looked... but could not find when the survey closes. When?"
I was planning to close the survey in time for the Global PR Wiki week. Last year I completed my surveys for the Global PR 1.00 in July. This year the event is happening in mid-June. However, I was hoping to get at least 100 respondents for the survey. So far we have about 50 or 60. So I may produce an early version of the report for or at least articles for the event in mid-June and then aim for June 24th for the business blogging workshop held by the American Marketing Association here in Boston. I am the moderator for one of the final round-up panels.
Posted by johncass at 4:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More on length of survey
Stephen’s post about the length of surveys is well taken.
“meant to mean: in general, a short survey will tend to get more responses, but then again, a longer survey will be more valuable.�
We struggled with a long questionnaire compared to a short survey. And we later made up a shorter survey. In some ways, may be we should have sent both.
Posted by johncass at 4:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2005Lots of Questions
Steven in his comment on the length of the survey suggests that we don't make the survey so long. "Don't ask "a lot of questions.""
He is right the survey is rather long, and the team at Backbone Media debated about the length of the survey. But I can tell you that we have had over 50 people take the survey and are getting some good results. So if you can sit through the effort, we will get some really great information that we can share with the rest of the corporate blogging industry.
I wanted to be comprehensive so that I had all of my questions about the value of blogging and who is blogging answered.
If the main survey was too long we do have a shorter version of the blogging survey you can take.
Posted by johncass at 2:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Preventing comment spam
After writing my entry about the importance of allowing readers to comment on a blog, I wondered about the ways that a blogger can prevent comment spam.
Yahoo! blogged about one thing they think will help prevent comment spam.
James Seng has also been blogging about solutions for comment spam, such as putting a catchpa by your comment field.
Posted by kristine at 2:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 26, 2005Length of the Survey
As Mike Manual states in his brief post in May our survey can take some time. Last year I had a seven question survey, and this year I really struggled with developing a short survey or a long survey, but I had a lot of questions I wanted to answer in terms of the value of blogging and who is actually blogging.
I'd really like to get a lot of input from product managers and product builders as most of my survey's last year were with people who were in that role at companies. However, part of the reason I am doing the survey is to discover who should be blogging at a company by researching who is blogging at the moment.
Posted by johncass at 10:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Blog Comments
I have gone through about 600 corporate blogs over the past few weeks. I've noticed a lot of interesting trends in blogging, and it's been a lot of fun reading so many blogs.
There are many trends I’ve noticed going around in the blogosphere. While most bloggers give an easy and accessible way to either contact them via email or leave a comment, I noticed that some blogs do not allow the readers to leave comments on their blogs.
Above all, blogs can be an excellent tool to start a conversation. This is why corporate blogs are great; it allows a company to converse with a customer. It makes the company more personable, especially when a blogger injects some of their own personality in the blog. Customers can discuss things with a company in an informal atmosphere. However, when a blog does not have a commenting capability, it can sometimes send a bad message to customers. It can appear that they do not wish to engage in a conversation with customers.
Popularity of those blogs often suffers as well. Many blogs without the comment feature have low page rankings and probably not an abundance of regular visitors.
I can understand why a blogger might turn off the comment feature on their blog though. Who wants to get a thought-filled blog post flooded with comments from Online Pharmacy or FreeIpods.com? Luckily, there are now ways to have comments on your blog without having to deal with that sort of spam, which is very cool!
Posted by kristine at 9:37 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 25, 2005The Value of Blogging
Robin Dindayal wrote about his experiences taking the corporate blogging survey. Robin was thinking about what other value corporate blogging can bring to a company, and he made up a list.
Posted by stephenbackbone at 5:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005Getting people to take the blog survey
On May 10, I began sending emails to corporate bloggers, requesting that they take our blogging survey. I contacted over 450 bloggers in the past two weeks. As of today, 322 of them have viewed the survey, and 61 have completed it.
Some bloggers were very eager to help us out and take the survey. Others did not take the survey for various reasons, and some took the survey but chose to remain anonymous.
Originally, I had a lengthy email that I was sending to bloggers, and if I couldn't find a contact form or email link, I was leaving comments directly on blog entries. I quickly found out that for some people doing the latter was a no-no and extremely poor etiquette in the blogosphere. I learned how personal blogs can be, even corporate ones, and have had much more luck with people taking the survey after I edited the email and read more of the individual's blogs.
A corporate blog can be incredibly beneficial to a company when used correctly. With our survey, we are discovering not only what bloggers see in their own blogs, but also what qualities they enjoy in the blogs of others. The results will be useful to all sorts of corporate bloggers and I'm excited to see what all of the results are!
Posted by kristine at 1:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Market Research Using Blogs
Is it possible to help marketing researchers get better results with blogs. A blog can be much more of a community, so I suspect the big way that a blog can help is to build a community of existing survey respondents before you start your survey.
Once you launch your survey you can then leverage that existing community to take the survey.
Posted by johncass at 1:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Getting the word out about the survey
Last year when I started the corporate blogging survey on my personal blog PR Communications I surveyed about 7-10 bloggers about their corporate blogs. It was relatively easy to contact people either through email, though typically I had to send a comment to the blogger. This year we have been using press releases, direct contacts, and telephone calls. A more personal email appears to help more in terms of encouraging someone to post a survey. We do have quite a few questions, but I really designed the survey like that so that we would have some good data about many different issues.
Posted by johncass at 1:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2005Corporate Blog Survey
Backbone Media is conducting a survey of people who run business blogs in order to get a better understanding of why companies start them, potential roadblocks in the process and how blogs are impacting key aspects of corporate communications.
The Backbone Media Corporate Blogging Survey is accessabe through this link:
http://www.backbonemedia.com/blogsurvey/
£5,000
Posted by stephenbackbone at 1:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
