A recent Burson-Marsteller survey found 15% of the Fortune 500 have blogs. I had to read this one twice. I was frankly surprised by this, though probably shouldn’t be. Actually I should, since Burson’s Chief Digital Strategist Erin Byrne was also surprised:
“When I thought about it, I thought that the number would have been higher, and I think the reason…why it still isn’t higher is that companies are still grappling with how they participate in the conversation when they don’t have control over the message.”
As you would guess the 15% is heavily weighted to companies in the general tech sector, with retailing also well represented. Still the number is low - really low considering that blogging is a pretty basic building block of a social media strategy.
At RelevantMind we spend a lot of time dealing with the strategies impacting the broader social engagement landscape. I’d somewhat disagree with Erin though – blogging is one of the more structured and controllable forms of social media. I think the reason behind the lack of adoption isn’t that blogging in and of itself is that daunting. But an effective blogging strategy needs both commitment and internal evangelism. It may be (relatively) controllable, but it is opening the door to the whole social media engagement world.
