This is the third post in quick succession and seventh overall in a series on Fortune 500 corporate blogs. This is the final post in the series on blog memes and focuses on which companies produced the most memes.
The chart below shows all 299 memes by company and it is a short list. All 299 of the memes I collected were attributed to just 14 out of the 76 Fortune 500 companies with corporate blogs.
The concentration among such a small group was surprising because this data was derived rather than actively collected. It was also a little disappointing because it immediately limited the extent to which any findings could be generalized across all companies and corporate blogs.
As the graph clearly shows, Google’s corporate blogs accounted for almost half of the memes by itself. Although, it is important to note that all corporate blogs associated with each of the 76 Fortune 50 companies found to have blogs were tracked.
At the time of data collection Google had 62 blogs, more than any other company. The next highest was Hewlett-Packard with 53 blogs followed by Yahoo! with 28. Although Google dominated blog memes, it was also part of a larger skew towards Internet and technology companies in general.
The pie chart below shows that almost two third of memes were produced by Internet Services and Retailing companies while related industries such as Computers/Office Equipment and Peripherals were also present.
This was a little less surprising than the company spread because the overall number of Fortune 500 blogs also skewed towards technology-related industries. The complete table of data for memes by Fortune industry sector is available here.
These findings affect the interpretation of all of the data on blog memes presented in this series. It has to be analyzed from the perspective that a small number of companies, clustered in technology-related industries and dominated specifically by Google were disproportionately represented in memes.
Similarly, it is also useful to remember that most memes were made up of just two posts connected to a corporate blog entry. All of the patterns and relationships in the data are interrelated and deriving meaning has to be done holistically. The previously mentioned and general limitations also apply.
Posted on July 24, 2009
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.