Corporate Blog Meme Structure

This is the fifth post in my series on Fortune 500 corporate blogs and it describes the structure of corporate blog memes. As I mentioned in the previous post, out of the 5,887 corporate blog entries posted in my study window, only 299 produced memes of at least two tiers.

The tier system is based on the Blogpulse conversation tracker which was used to identify memes and the relationship between blog posts based on the direction of hyperlinks. For example, posts linking directly to corporate blogs were classified as tier one posts. Posts linking to those tier one posts were tier two posts and so on.

The chart below shows the frequency of memes observed by the number of tiers from a minimum of two to a maximum of seven. The same sharp downward trend that was present in previous charts is also visible in the depth of corporate blog memes.

Of the 299 memes that were collected, 240 were comprised of the minimum two tiers and it was illustrated in the previous post that 163 of these were made up of just two blog posts.

A very small number of memes extended beyond three tiers and understanding the factors that separate these memes from the rest is of great interest to marketers wanting to spread content and messages through social media channels.

It would also be interesting to compare the structure and specifically the depth of blog memes with the way content spreads through the retweet function (or otherwise) in Twitter. Early statistics would seem to suggest that the depth of memes in Twitter are also quite shallow but constraints like the 140-character limit (and possibly many more) may affect attribution and therefore data collection.

The second chart below shows the number of blog entries found in each tier across all memes. As only memes containing at least two tiers were collected, it only represents a subset of the total number of posts that linked to corporate blogs. The number of tier one posts is smaller that the actual total and as a result the overall number of posts is also smaller.

The total number of consumer blog posts that can be connected back to corporate blogs probably demonstrates a more perfect downward curve similar to those observed in other areas but of the memes collected (min. two tiers) the number of posts expanded by almost double from tier one to tier two. The sharp declined observed elsewhere started from tier two to tier three.

As with previous posts in this series, there are a number of caveats specific to this data that I want to mention here in addition to the general Disclaimers, Caveats and Limitations page.

First, these figures depend entirely on the coverage and accuracy of the Blogpulse index which based on their website is continually worked on and improved. Second, like the rest of the data published in this series, it represents a snapshot in time.

I also want to reiterate that this data is a subset of consumer blog posts that can be tied back to corporate blogs because I think that can get lost when looking at charts. Only posts in memes with at least two tiers were recorded because they were the only ones useful for my study so many tier one posts were not recorded.

Posted on July 22, 2009