Fortune 500 List Demonstrates The Power Of Blogging

While companies are even quicker to flip the switch and hop on to Twitter, more and more companies are still just beginning to publish public-facing Blogs (while some haven’t even thought about it yet). The following research illustrates that Blogging in corporate America has come a long way (but still has a long ways to go). 

This past Wednesday, the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) released a 13-page report titled, The Fortune 500 and Blogging – Slow and steady

and farther along than expected (PDF download), conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson (CEO, Financial Insite). And here is the main finding:

Only 81 out of the Fortune 500 (16%) currently have a public-facing blog. In comparison, 39 percent of the Inc. 500, 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 Charities have public-facing blogs.

"The report conclusively shows that while the Fortune 500 companies are adopting social media at a slower rate than other leading businesses, universities and charities, many more of them are blogging than has been previously reported," stated the press release, Fortune 500 Corporate Blog Adoption Slow and Steady According to Society for New Communications Research Chair Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson of Financial Insite.

Here are some additional stats:

• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts (other Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts, but they are not linked to their blogs).
• Five of the top ten companies have public blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America.
• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled.
• The computer software/hardware technology industry has the most blogs, followed by the food and drug industry, financial services, Internet services, semi-conductors, retail and automotive respectively.
• Ten percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to podcasts; 21 percent incorporate video

It would be interesting to take this information and add on both internal and B2B Blogs (which may be included in the above report – I could not tell). One of the better ways to get a company to think about public facing Blogs is to leverage internal ones for information dissemination and collaboration. Once the executive suite starts to see the benefits in terms of ROI and productivity, it becomes much easier to open the channels of Blog communications up to the general public.

What do you think, is 16% a good number or should the Fortune 500 companies really be embracing Blogging more?