The big coffeehouse

Technorati is currently tracking 112.8 million blogs. Technorati tracked approximately 64 million blogs in January 2007(Sifry). This means that the big coffeehouse, to use the words of Wikinomics authors Williams and Tapscott, is increased with approximately 48 million more visitors. Reading these statitics made me curious about who and how many people are also in the coffeehouse to listen and to comment. And found that:
- an average 25% of the internet users read blogs,
- they spend average 0.75 days a week on reading blog
- an average of 45% is an influencer (except in the UK, 29%)
in the following prestation of Edelmans StrategyOne.

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Surfing the web I also found that there are a growing number of surveys about blogging(see also november post). At Frankwatching.com I came across the research (in english)of Sven de Clercq.

Do you have a corporate blog or are there reasons why you don't have a corporate blog?

I am looking for:
- corporate bloggers,
- companies that have a blog
- companies that have thought about blogging but decided not to.

My dissertation discusses the positive and negatives effects of corporate blogging. I would like to include the perspective of corporate bloggers or companies that decided not to. Are you (or your company) willing to talk about why you started a corporate blog, how you promote your blog and what the effects are? Or why you or your company decided not to?

Please leave me a note or reply privately. Many thanks

Marketers embrace social media

Last year at least 6 books were published that dealt with blogging for companies. They all discuss the benefits of blogging as a marketing tool: increase your brand awareness, relationship building with your customers, increase your website traffic, etc. Former Microsoft Blogger Robert Scoble and Shel Israel give a few nice examples of succesful corporate bloggers in their book Naked Conversations. One of the examples discusses the succes of a small, but exclusive London Suit Tailor . Thomas Mahon increased his sales with 300% in 10 weeks. So it seems even to work for the smallest companies.

The year 2007 becomes more and more the year to employ social media. It seems at least a hot topic for conferences. Marketing Profs organises a free virtual conference for marketers the 13th June. At least two topics deal with social media. Broback and Klein's blog, mention the companies that attended FiRe and that only use social media to sell their wares. Broback and Klein published a book about blogging in 2006. You can receive their book Publish and Prosper for free. Unfortunately I already bought it.