According to the results of a study released at the BlogOn conference in New York, 55% of corporations are blogging internally, externally, or both.
Guidewire Group’s BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey suggests 91.4% of these corporations are using blogs internally and 96.6% externally.
If you believe these results, I have the deed to a nice bridge we should talk about.
There’s no word on how the study was conducted or what the sample was, but it appears that the survey instrument itself was available on a Survey Monkey website. If that’s the case, it’s likely that only people from companies with blogs bothered to answer, skewing the results more than American Idol fans with their call-in votes. Anybody working in the world of corporations knows that the vast majority of companies are holding back (or, in some cases, resisting blogs altogether). At far more than 10%, the people who would make the decision to launch a blog don’t even know what they are.
It would be nice to see a legitimate, scientific study of, say, the Fortune 1000. I remember such studies dealing with intranet adoption about a decade ago. In the meantime, we’re stuck with this nonsense. Nevertheless, there are some interesting numbers deeper in the study. For example, among those companies responding that actually do have intranet blogs, the predominant use is knowledge sharing (63%) and internal communications (44%). About 60% of those with external blogs have more than one and 17% have more than five.
Interestingly, the biggest problem business bloggers face is maintaining enthusiasm.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
