Home » Marketing, Social Media

Only 15% of Fortune 500 has a blog

6 August 2008 2 Comments

Earlier I wrote how Inc. 500 companies are starting to embrace social media and I fleetingly mentioned how they are outpacing the Fortune 500 companies  in the adoption stakes.

A study by Burson-Marsteller, a global PR firm, has revealed that 15% of the Fortune 500 companies currently manage a blog. Most of them operate in the tech industry. Whilst I certainly would not be naive enough to suggest each and every company needs a blog, I certainly would have expected more of these companies to be with the times.

According to the study, the top companies of the Fortune 500 list have a higher adoption rate than companies lower on the list. Whilst 32% of the top 50 companies have a company blog the number gets lower and lower the further you go down the list.

What I did find rather strange is that Erin Byrne, chief digital strategist at Burson-Marsteller, attributes this to resources:

“It’s not surprising that the biggest companies are doing more blogging. They have more resources for communications”

Whilst blogging is certainly time consuming, it can also be very cost effective - if managed properly. It has also turned out to be a great game leveler, with smaller companies being able to operate and compete with far larger companies by joining the conversation, rather then ignoring the consumer and picking their pockets. So I don’t believe it’s because of money. I mean anyone mentioned on the Fortune 500 is no mug money wise.

Maybe its because the top 50 companies are well established names and there for more often targeted for consumers critisism, their need for a company blog may have simply been bigger than companies further down the list, who are less well known.

Obviously this is pure speculation, so I’d love to find out if anybody can provide and insight or an educated guess - so please share them in the comments!

More posts like this:

2 Comments »

  • Erin Byrne said:

    Thanks for including Burson’s study in your post. My attributing one of the reasons that top 50 companies of the F500 blog more than others in the index to resources has to do with what I hear as the barriers from leading companies. The top two concerns that I hear from corporate communications and marketing executives about blogging are around resources and control of messaging. Companies continue to struggle with understanding who should have responsibility for blogging, monitoring, and responding, and how execs should manage those tasks on top of everything else they already have to do. The more resources a company has at their disposal, the less likely I am to hear concerns about resources and staffing. I certainly agree that blogging can be very cost effective when done well and in the spirit of creating dialog. But knowing that as a digital strategist, and believing it as someone who needs to prove this out in a corporate communications function are two different things.

    The other concern I hear a lot is around control (or lack thereof) of the message. Our next release of our Fortune 500 blogging study will look at who is blogging within leading companies, the topics they discuss, and how willing they are to participate in conversation versus control a message.

    - 9 August 2008 at 9:50 pm
  • Daan Jansonius (author) said:

    Hi Erin, thanks for elaborating on your research!

    Responsibility certainly seems to be an issue. With various departments who could all claim to have some thing at stake with blogging, as well as the legal people making sure no body says anything out of line with corporate policy it’s difficult to get any kind of initiative going.

    I’d be very interested to read that report, so it would be great if you could let me know when it goes live!

    - 10 August 2008 at 6:34 pm

Trackbacks

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.