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June 10, 2005Corporate Blogging Survey & Case Studies
Fredrik wrote a comment in answer to my earlier post.
“I just came to the logical conclusion that since you don't have enough respondents, it's too early to trust any results yet. I assume that you have set the goal (# of responses) partly based on how many you need to reach statistical validity.�
Last year when I conducted the survey, I just conducted interviews and produced some really great content based on the surveys, I learnt a lot from the experience and it really changed expanded my ideas on all of the values blogs bring to companies. It became less a matter of search engine results and sales, and more a matter of product development and building a strong brand through community.
This year the survey has been much more extensive. Our sampling methods have been to get as many corporate bloggers as possible. It’s been difficult to determine how many corporate blogs exist on the Internet at the moment. Both Kristine’s and my sense is that fewer corporate blogs exist than we expected, when we started the survey in May, that perspective comes from searching for blogs and looking at the lists that exist out on the net.
In addition I am not relying on just the data from the survey; I’ve also been conducting personal interviews with survey respondents and other bloggers I wanted to interview for case studies within the paper we are developing.
One issue around that is that I believe there are very few companies who are really using corporate blogging techniques to their full potential, so as a percentage of the industry I think the general results do actually reflect what is going on in the industry. But I also wanted to include in my case studies some of those particular companies who are furthest developed in their use of corporate blogs, as I believe they have a lot to teach the rest of the industry. I can say I’ve been very happy with the results so far in getting some data that confirms some of the information I discovered last year.
Some of the case studies on how companies are using blogs are unique and therefore will not reflect the general survey results. I suppose this is to be expected; corporate blogging is new, what 2-3 years old. Not every company will be implementing all of the techniques that are available to them, but that’s why I am conducting the survey to learn what value different companies are gaining from corporate blogging, we can then show the different models to the wider community, and each learn from others experiences. I also hoped to identify new techniques, and I can say we are doing that. When we publish the paper, and other articles think of the survey as both the survey you took and the case studies that we developed from direct interviews with bloggers.
Posted by johncass at June 10, 2005 8:35 AM
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