SURVEY & CASE STUDIES OVERVIEW

518 bloggers were contacted for the corporate blogging survey, resulting in 816 people visiting the survey page. Anecdotally, we were surprised to discover that there are not as many corporate blogs on the Internet as the volume of current media interest might indicate. Even though a few companies have several hundred, if not thousands of blogs listed, not every blog at a major company actually had a lot of posts and comments. In situations in which we found blogs with hardly any content we did not contact that blogger. We have had 97 people take the corporate blogging survey, and of those respondents, 75 were bloggers and 22 were non-bloggers. Backbone Media's survey engine diverted non-bloggers to a series of questions about blogging in general whose results will be published at a later date. This paper contains the published results of the respondents who stated they ran a corporate blog.

The corporate blogging survey at Backbone Media was developed on top of the corporate blogging research one of the principal authors conducted during the spring of 2004. Backbone Media's 2005 corporate blogging survey consists of an online survey with 32 questions. In addition, a series of interviews were conducted with six corporate bloggers in conjunction and independently of the survey. Many of the companies that were interviewed for last year's corporate blogging survey were interviewed again, Microsoft and Macromedia specifically, though different bloggers from those companies were interviewed for this year's survey.

Anecdotal evidence from bloggers in last year's survey demonstrated that corporate blogs give companies the opportunity to promote their companies through improving search engine rankings, direct traffic, and generate PR. This year's survey was an attempt to assess the value of blogging in general and find out the current state of the corporate blogging environment. It was our hypothesis that the search engine optimization value of blogs is very high because blogs are easy to read for search engines and the best blogs generate relevant link popularity. [1] We will also explore what makes a blog successful and who should consider blogging in a company? If a company is considering blogging, what will they gain from blogging? We will give examples of successful blogs in the consumer products and software industries. To achieve the best results in search engine optimization companies should focus their efforts on writing about their own products and their development.

Using information from the case studies, we will suggest that each company is using a different blogging content strategy. It is a company's blogging content strategy that will determine the overall relative success of a corporate blog when it comes to building a community. The success of building community will determine a company's level of direct traffic, higher search results, and online PR. Using the survey results and examples from the case study interviews, we will demonstrate the results.

1 "Link Popularity" makes a big difference with search engine rankings. Link popularity is essentially the number of links pointing back to a specific page and domain (a.k.a. "backlinks") combined with the relative popularity and relevance of each of the backlinks that companies have received from their corporate blogging efforts, thereby demonstrating the reasons why a company should consider blogging.