BackBoneMedia Releases Corporate Blogging Case Study
Posted on July 1, 2005
Backbonemedia has published the results from an interesting survey and study of bloggers at hundreds of companies. They also conducted in-depth interviews with leading individuals from six corporate blogs: Annie's Homegrown, IBM, iUpload, Macromedia, Maytag and Microsoft. The study found that a slight majority of bloggers took less than 1-2 months to start their blog after initial management review. The most used blogging platforms by the bloggers were Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type. Over 83% of bloggers saw a traffic increase after launching a blog. And 59% said they been contacted by a journalist about content on their blog.
Question #5 asked bloggers what some of the biggest hurdles or risk factors to starting a corporate blog are:
'Costs in terms of man hours' was seen as the biggest potential roadblock to starting a blog. This makes sense, its in the nature of blogs the requirement to post a lot of comments, that it requires a lot of discipline to post comments on a regular basis. It is therefore important to develop good solid content strategies before starting a blog. Conducting interviews, reading other blogs, surveying your audience and employees on a regular basis, keeping current on industry trends are all strategies for developing content. 'Legal liability' was the next most important factor, thinking about and seeking advice from colleagues or industry bloggers will help to mitigate any posts that might cause liability. Many companies are now developing corporate blogging policies based on blogger experience and legal advice. Reviewing other company blogging policies can help you to develop your own policy.The full report can be found here.