Oct 2004
State of the Blogosphere: Corporate Bloggers
This is part 4 of a series on the growth of the Blogosphere, its impact on
individuals, corporations, media, politics, and technology,
Part
1 covered the overall
growth of the blogosphere, part
2 covered the volume
of postings, and part
3 covered the growing
influence that bloggers are having, and compared them to the online
presences of traditional mainstream media.
Today I'll discuss a small but influential segment of bloggers -
Corporate Bloggers. These are people who blog in an official or
semi-official capacity at a company, or are so affiliated with the
company where they work that even though they are not officially
spokespeople for the company, they are clearly affiliated. For
example, the folks in SAP's developers program get blogs if they
want them, and are available to anyone who joins the (free) SAP
developers network. This group also includes folks at Sun
Microsystems and at Microsoft, where employees are actively
encouraged to blog.
The chart above (click on it to see a larger version) shows some
of the organizations that are at the forefront of the corporate
blogging wave. In addition to the big corporate names and the
bloggers at companies involved in the blogging space, there are a
large number of individual consultants, small business owners, and
individual CxO bloggers - about 3,000 that we have identified as of
October 2004 - which fill the "other" category. These are folks who
are blogging about what is going on at their businesses, but either
because of the small number of people at the business, or the small
number of bloggers at the individual business, we aggregated them
into a single category.
Even though some of the largest technology companies are
represented in this graph, to me this shows that we are still at
the relative start of accepted use of blogging as a part of
corporate policy - and that there is still a tremendous opportunity
for forward-thinking companies and management to have a significant
positive impact on their public perception by encouraging an
enlightened blogging policy, encouraging openness both within and
outside of the organization.