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May 23, 2006Blogging Credibility Low Amongst Fortune 1000 Executives
eMarketer provides a great overview of the Harris Interactive and Makovsky & Company survey on the "2006 state of corporate blogging," where a number of Fortune 1000 executives are interviewed on their thoughts about blogging.
There's a lot of skepticism about blogging in the results of the survey. I was surprised to read that 15% of the respondents have someone in their company writing a blog related to their company's efforts. That indicates that the fortune 500 wiki might be wrong about the number of fortune 500 companies blogging overall at 4-6%. Unless more companies are blogging below the Fortune 500 in size, the differences in numbers make me suspect there might be a problem with their survey data. The respondents might be weighted too heavily with people who blog or who are positive towards blogging. Therefore if anything this survey might be more positive towards corporate blogging than reality.
As I've mentioned on this blog before, I believe we are in the very early days of companies using blogs for corporate communications. There's not much understanding of the size of consumer generated media, for example 30% of the survey respondents in the poll have a through understanding of what an internet blog is, this means there's more room for educating executives on corporate blogging. Though the survey result show that a high number of executives think their company should write policies to manage blogs written by employees that are related or unrelated with their company, I think this indicates there is a lot of understanding of the power of consumer generated media amongst fortune 1000 executives. I just think that there's not a lot of understanding how their companies can connect with auidences through consumer generated media.
Posted by johncass at May 23, 2006 9:50 AM
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Comments
Hmmm... Surveys, a tool of marcomms. Another reason to avoid it and suspect the results.
Posted by: David Phillips at May 23, 2006 1:03 PM
True David. But what do you think about their results IF we take them at face value. Why do you think so many executives are skepical about blogging's credibility?
Posted by: john cass at May 23, 2006 2:42 PM
John,
First off, I have to agree with David, the methodology gives me great pause. There is little explaination of the sample and an 8 point margin of error is pretty large, makes me suspect the validity.
However, IF I were take the results at face value, I would be shocked that:
1) Knowledge of blogging is still so low
2) So few companies are even monitoring blogs
There is more discussion at my blog (sorry for the shameless plug): http://insidethecubicle.blogs.com/blog/2006/05/big_businesses_.html
Posted by: Jeffrey Treem at May 25, 2006 9:57 AM
Jeffrey, I enjoyed reading your post.
But I wonder why you are so shocked that knowledge of blogging is so low? You and I might have been blogging for some time. But we should not forget that that's not the whole world for most people, especially in corporate America. I think people know about blogging, but may not really understand how this new medium works, or how they can interact with their audience through blogs.
I am not surprised that few companies are monitoring blogs YET!
Posted by: John Cass at May 25, 2006 10:28 AM
