As the lead author of two corporate blogging survey's over the last two years, one initiated on my blog PR Communications, and the other in my role as Director of Blogging Strategies at Backbone Media, I was very interested in the results form Cymfony's and Porter Novelli's Corporate Blog Learnings: The Discovery Age. The survey of 73 corporate bloggers provided some understanding of what corporate bloggers are thinking at the moment. However, as with the Backbone Media Corporate blogging survey 2005, the low numbers don't give a good representation of the entire market. But even I was pretty surprised by the low response for the study. Maybe survey fatigue on the part of corporate bloggers.
Robert French wrote an article about how Steve Rubel discussed the anticipated release of the survey.
Jeremy Pepper's comment on Steve Rubel's post was interesting to me.
"Forced into blogging is no way to go into blogging. It's actually not good for PR or blogging ... and a bit of a statement about what 'may' be happening in corporate blogging."
With the low numbers of companies currently blogging, maybe 5.8% of the fortune 500 according to the fortune 500 wiki, and in my view probably less than 5% of companies overall, is Jeremy right have we hit a plateau in the number of companies blogging? I think we are at an interesting stage, in the technology sector the number of companies blogging is probably quite large, while in other industries the numbers are low. Customers will drive more corporate blogs, as the number of customers reading and using blogs increase I believe the number of corporate blogs in other industries will increase.
