At the time of data collection in September 2008, there were 76 Fortune 500 companies publishing at least one corporate blog as I defined them. There were 391 blogs in total although this included some portals/platforms that encompassed from a few dozen to several thousand individual employee blogs.
The list was dominated by technology companies and technology-related industries. The chart below shows the top 15 companies by the number of corporate blogs for each.
A full list of Fortune 500 corporate blogs identified in this study is available here. The list is probably already a little old given how fast things change. There was at least one more recent survey of Fortune 500 blogs that counted 81 companies blogging although selection criteria may differ.
The chart below shows that 66 of the 76 companies with blogs in my study had between 1 and 10 blogs and 8 of the remaining 10 were associated with no more than 20.
I conducted a survey of Fortune 500 companies for my Masters thesis and I wanted to share some of the data it produced in the hope of making it useful. In order to do that in a blog format, I plan to keep things as simple as possible by not approaching it in an academic way. That might prove to be a mistake but we’ll see what happens.
Background
I don’t plan to post within the context of my thesis because it’s probably not interesting or useful for very many people. Instead, I’ll focus on presenting basic data on corporate blogs. However, I have added a few pages on my study to provide some context for anyone that might be interested:
I plan to post all of the underlying data on Swivel which makes it possible to cut, slice, comment, share and download public data. It looks like Swivel is undertaking a pretty major redesign at the moment so things might change but I’ll try to make sure all data is available somewhere.
This is a work-in-progress. I’m still in the process of uploading data and I’m still adding links to several the pages listed above. This will probably continue as I post new charts and interlink pages and posts where helpful.
Questions or Feedback
If you have any questions or feedback on anything posted here or in this series, you can email me at phillip.d.baker@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can (usually pretty quickly).
John A. Byrne, Executive Editor at BusinessWeek, spoke at the 140 Characters conference last week and he made some powerful statements about Google and the media industry that offer stark contrast with the views expressed by some other media organizations in recent months:
Google is fantastic because it allows people to discover you. But when people type in a query in that simple little box, they’re agnostic as to brand. They want the information, they don’t care where they go. And so, essentially it’s a machine to destroy relationships that people have with either yourself or your brand…
I think it’s important to think about Google in that way, not in the negative sense, but in the way that makes you to do something to counteract that transactional nature that breaks down the relationships.
And that’s why I think engagement is the single most important thing we need to work on because we have largely been divorced from our audiences…FOREVER, we don’t have enough respect for the people who read us and are even influenced by us. I think we truly need to deeply engage and collaborate with our audience to expand it and to protect it from this major transaction mechanism…
I think this is an excellent way to think about Google, particularly the attitude towards solving the problem Google presents. Although, Google doesn’t necessarily destroy any real relationships as much as it highlights where there were none to start with and creates its own.
Engagement may help, but it sounds like an attempt to build (or rebuild) old relationships that are based on an affinity with news brands by involving users as collaborators. This may help to align the actual collaborators with a particular news brand. It may also improve the perceived value of that content by other users, but I’m not sure it’s enough to help large numbers of users bypass search engines.
Collaboration and other forms of engagement are important because they create interactions. But there are lots of other, user-driven interactions that are already taking place – commenting, bookmarking, posting, tweeting etc. Remembering all of these interactions and by extension remembering and distinguishing between users can lead to real relationships, and it scales.
Amazon knows who I am, what I’ve bought and what I’ve looked at. It uses that information to suggest what else I might like (as well as knowing how to charge me and where to ship etc). Media organizations could do exactly the same thing by knowing what I’ve read, what I’ve commented on, what I’ve shared (as well as where I live etc) to recommend articles and what ever else they can offer me based on what they know about me.
If you truly know your users and have real, learned relationships with them, they shouldn’t need to go anywhere near Google unless it’s to search for you specifically because they need an exact URL.
I give up. Twitter is the proverbial elephant surrounded by blind men. It’s something different to everyone who uses it, and even that seems to change quite quickly as new tools are launched and users find new ways to use Twitter. Is it a mouthpiece for celebrities? Is it a place for brands? Is it a broadcast medium? Is it for conversations?
The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all of the above, and that probably contributes in large part to the allure of Twitter. People choose to use it for different things and they’re creating new ways to use it all the time.
In addition, what you can use Twitter for is not a completely free choice. To a certain extent, the number of people you follow and that follow you dictate what you are able to do with Twitter.
There is no distribution without followers so can’t necessarily use it to ‘broadcast’ anything, assuming you want to be heard. But, at the same time, it must be impossible to hold a ‘conversation’ with 10,000+ followers whether you want to or not. Of course, I don’t know for sure, because that is not my experience.
I like Andrew McAfee’s approach best. He and his MBA class brainstormed Twitter’s properties a while back and it’s a really good list. Thinking about Twitter’s attributes might provide a more objective method for determining what it can or should be used for.
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.