Four Corporate Blogging Reviews
A group of students from the University of Oregon have been reviewing Fortune 500 company blogs for their Advanced PR writing class.
Alison Nicole Grise reviews the eBay Developers blog - The blog receives a poor rating for a lack of interactivity, there's no ability to comment on the blog. 40 out of 80.
Jean Kim reviews all of the Microsoft blogs, well actually Jean focused o the Microsoft Higher Education blog - the review was a little confusing as Jean jumped around from the higher Ed blog to other tech blogs. However, Jean did say that the Microsoft blogs were very technology focused, and that when she thought the blogs were not very interactive or responsive. 49 out of 80.
Sarah E. Essary reviews the Inside Nike blog - Sarah rated the Nike blog as good, but had some problems with the black background, and the inability to be able to comment on posts.
Stephanie L reviews the Yahoo! Search Blog - The blog received a thumbs up from Stephanie, lots of posts, links to other blogs, and interactivity. One problem might be that the Yahoo! bloggers don't appear to answer comments. I thought Stephanie’s review was good. 54 out of 80.
Lastly, I just did a recount of all of the blogs on the wiki, and noticed our count was out by two, so we have 60 companies blogging in the Fortune 500 or 12%.
Love the idea, John.
It is good to hear that PR students are becoming immersed in blogging before they hit the job market.
A couple of months ago, I gave a lecture to about 40 college students. When I asked them to name a blog they frequented, it was like pulling teeth.
Good to see that this is part of the curriculum of Oregon's Advanced PR course.
Posted by: Rob Longert | May 05, 2008 at 11:24 AM
Rob, you make a very good point about age and peer groups. I think we each use the social media technologies our peer groups use. As college students graduate, probably they will start using more blogs as their work peers are reading them.
Encouraging more classes to review corporate blogs, might also get us a complete review of the Fortune 500 companies that are blogging. We are at 28 companies covered, we still need reviews for the other 32 companies.
Posted by: John Cass | May 05, 2008 at 11:39 AM
I just assigned a this project to my small Advanced Writing class this afternoon, so I expect you'll see at least three more reviews by the end of the week!
Kelli
University of Oregon
Posted by: Kelli Matthews | May 05, 2008 at 11:17 PM
Kelli, that's great news, looking forward to the reviews.
Posted by: John Cass | May 05, 2008 at 11:31 PM
Thank you for featuring my students' blog reviews! It is exciting to participate in this project. I expect that the remaining 32 blog reviews will be accomplished soon.
Posted by: Tiffany Derville | May 06, 2008 at 01:58 AM
Thanks for assigning the reviews Tiffany!
Posted by: John Cass | May 06, 2008 at 10:25 AM