A new report about corporate blogs
According to a survey released by Backbone Media, a search engine marketing company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, corporate blogs are a good way of interacting with customers and consumers. But the almost obvious conclusion of this 72-page report is based on a population which doesn’t seem to be representative. “518 bloggers were contacted for the corporate blogging survey, resulting in 816 people visiting the survey page.” And on the only 97 people who filled the survey form, 75 were bloggers.
Here is a link to the full survey (PDF format, 72 pages, 1.02 MB).
And here are selected excerpts from the executive summary.
We asked bloggers at hundreds of companies to participate in an online survey and conducted in-depth interviews with leading individuals from six corporate blogs that were selected as representative of the diverse spectrum of the corporate blogging world.
What we discovered was that for the majority of our survey sample, (which includes some of today’s biggest corporations and scrappiest underdogs), corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. We discovered that corporate blogs are giving established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting in ways that are tangible to the sales and marketing side of the business.
And here is another — expected — conclusion.
Listening to customers and acting on their suggestions is one of the best ways to build a group of customers who are committed to expressing their goodwill to their community. It is a common practice in blogging to provide a link back to a thought originator, which is valuable because backlinks are a way that search engines distinguish the order of the editorial rankings. When customers start commenting, posting or tracking back to their blogging community it can have a viral effect - spreading the word through other blogs. We discovered that it is a company’s blogging strategy that will produce the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill brings the most marketing and sales returns.
So this report is interesting, and you should read some of the case studies, but its conclusions would have been more valuable if thousands of bloggers have answered the survey.
