Businesses are not bloggers -- at least not yet, according to a new eMarketer report. Will they ever be?
The explosive political and cultural power of blogs has made them the focus of numerous media reports in recent months. But thus far the economic impact of blogging has been almost immeasurable.
In an effort to gain some perspective on a segment of cyberspace that is growing and changing at a sometimes bewildering pace, eMarketer aggregated a wide variety of data and commentary about blogs, their readers and writers, and also did a spot check of major U.S. corporations to see how far and how fast the phenomenon has spread as a business tool.
The starting point for considering blogs from a business perspective is that, despite their growth and influence, blogs continue to be an unfamiliar phenomenon to a significant number of internet users.
It is hard to square these high unfamiliarity levels with the attention that blogs have received over the past year. How could so many controversial stories fail to create a broader public awareness of blogs? Part of the reason may be that blogs are not necessarily recognizable as such to many first-time readers. Blogs share certain features that make them instantly identifiable to regular users. But to the inexperienced, blog pages may be indistinguishable from other web pages -- both have text, links, graphics, ads, et cetera. So it seems likely that many internet users have visited blogs without realizing it.
The 2004 election cycle not only brought blogs to the attention of the general public, but also created a much larger blog readership. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that the percentage of internet users who had read blogs jumped from 17 percent in February 2004 to 27 percent in November. New figures released by Pew earlier this month, however, showed readership growth had stalled.
The Pew data suggest that roughly 16 percent of the entire US adult population, or about 32 million adults, have read blogs. And although the wording of the question is broad -- if a respondent recalled visiting a single blog even once, it would count toward the total -- Pew found a significant number of regular readers: About seven percent of the online population, or roughly 8.4 million people, said they had looked at a blog in the last 24 hours. (Similarly, a Forrester Research poll found that five percent of online consumers said that they regularly read blogs.)
Blog creation has, if anything, outstripped the growth of readership. Technorati began tracking the number of blogs in late 2002, when it counted 15,729. As of early May 2005, the number was close to 10 million. Perseus Development estimates that there will be more than 50 million hosted blogs by the end of this year.
It is interesting to note that while readership growth may have taken a breather after the contentious US election season, activity by blog creators did not flag. The number of blogs skyrocketed after the election, according to Technorati, and blog posting, after easing up after the vote, spiked to new highs ahead of the Super Bowl this year.
For all the interest and activity in the blogosphere, however, American businesses appear to be taking a cautious approach. A spot check of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 found just four percent of companies had any form of publicly available blog -- and not all of these were current and active. Not surprisingly, most are the products of Internet and technology companies, but a handful of other corporations are experimenting with the form, including General Motors, which has won a lot of attention for its FastLane site.
Although the appeal of blogs for many readers is direct communication with the blog writer, “created persona” blogs -- sites ostensibly maintained by fictitious characters -- seem to be a tempting marketing tool for corporate America. Procter & Gamble recently launched a site tied to its Secret Sparkle sprays featuring four blog personas, one for each of the sprays’ scents. Similarly, Captain Morgan Rum offered a blog by the captain himself.
Setting aside these created persona sites, true corporate blogs offering a direct line of communication between writer and reader remain relatively rare. Decentralized by design, blogs are unlikely to become a mainstream business communications tool without change at the root level of corporate culture. As Intelliseek’s Pete Blackshaw put it in a recent ClickZ article, “Despite the allure, many companies simply aren’t blog-ready.”
Technorati founder David Sifry, in an online presentation mapping the extraordinary growth of blogging, sees corporations testing the waters, “but still no mainstream adoption in 2005.”
An Intelliseek/Edelman white paper on blogging suggests that companies should not be asking, “Should we have a blog?” Rather, the questions are deeper. The first question on the list is: Are you willing to engage in a dialogue with your public? It also notes: “If you cannot get past ‘marketing speak,’ and defensiveness, then do not blog.”
The appeal of blogs is their simplicity and directness. This kind of free-form communication is anathema to most American corporations, which spend vast amounts of money and time to hone a message and then regulate the way that message is delivered, regardless of format.
Doubtless more companies will give blogging a shot. But for the time being it is difficult to see corporate blogging becoming widespread, however tempting the new format may be as a marketing and communications tool.
This article is drawn from “The Business of Blogging,” a new eMarketer report by Ezra Palmer. Mr. Palmer is the editorial director for eMarketer.
eMarketer publishes data, analysis and market projections focusing on e-business, online marketing and emerging technology. Founded in 1996, eMarketer aggregates, filters, organizes and analyzes data from more than 1700 research firms, consultancies and government agencies around the globe.