Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes have released a new study that researches the number of companies in the Inc. 500 that use social media and other forms of new media, “The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500”. The results are interesting for people interested in corporate blogging. The Inc 500 is a list of the nation's fastest growing private companies. While only 8-9% of the Fortune 500 blog, it seems 19% of the Inc. 500 are blogging. Both the Fortune 500 Blog Project and the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki indicate that 43 companies and 40 companies respectively blog.
That's not all; the research team asked which other forms of social media companies used? Here are the results.
Message/Bulletin Boards 33%
Social Networking 27%
Online Video 24%
Blogging 19%
Wikis 17%
Podcasting 11%
This is an important study, especially as a number of pundits have suggested we are hitting a ceiling with the number people who will blog, and I suppose companies that will also blog. Something I don’t agree with personally. One of the research projects I am working on for the Society of New Communications Research is a corporate blogging policy project. During the research we determined that a company’s culture has an important role to play in how a company develops a blog, the more open the culture the higher the likelihood of easy transition to developing a blog. Though we have no data to back up this idea at the moment. I’d like to find out the characteristics of the companies that do blog in the Inc 500, the majority of the companies that blog in the Fortune 500 are technology related companies. It will be interesting to compare the number of tech related companies that blog in the Inc 500 with the ratio of technology companies in the Inc 500, and compare those numbers with the Fortune 500.
