We see report after report after report of the acceptance or the non-acceptance of corporate blogging as a marketing tool. Often the measurement is done based on the activities of the Fortune 50 or 500 which I find a little puzzling since they are likely to have the most difficult environment to truly blog based on rules and regulations that keep public companies from themselves regarding the financial side of the ledger.
eMarketer, however, is taking another stab at looking at this part of the online marketing world and sees the following from data that apparently goes beyond just the big boys. (Note – The full report is from eMarketer and is for sale on their site and MP receives no compensation from eMarketer).
Honestly, that is still a pretty low percentage in my estimation considering the potential value of a blog (if done correctly, kept up and truly utilized which is what keeps most away from the practice to begin with). Even with the prediction of 43% of companies utilizing the technique by 2012 it seems low but that’s just me.
What else did they uncover about blogs? The usual funny stuff that shows just how lame traditional media can be when it cries foul around their online counterparts / competition then turns around and relies on it for information for their ‘profession’.
Here is a chart showing how journalists use the online space (I think the correlation to the blogging info above is that they use blogs as sources but that’s just a guess). There is quite a dependency on all things online for these folks including ones, like Wikipedia, that are notorious for their content being factual vs. fictional (although maybe the truth is setting in since their dependence is down from last year).
So is corporate blogging set to become more commonplace? Will there be a time when over 50% of the companies are using blogs to their benefit? Is the importance of corporate blogs overplayed? Should companies at least be blogging so they can feed journalists the information they want to see published since they are increasingly being used for sources anyway?
You tell us. You’re the experts after all. Thanks.
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