Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz gave a great keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo last month. He was interviewed by Tim O’Reilly. The 30 minute-plus interview covered a wide range of fascinating business- and technology-related topics, not the least of which was business blogging. The first five minutes after the introduction concentrate specifically on how Schwartz — whom O’Reilly called “One of the most senior bloggers around” in terms of business leadership — uses his blog to reach both employees and potential clients.

Jonathan Schwartz accepts blogging wholeheartedly, but rejects the word itself. “‘Blogging’ will at some point be a little anachronistic. I communicate. My number one job as a leader of a company is to communicate. You used to communicate by being the celebrity CEO, you flew around and spoke with heads of state, and got local media to cover it, and got your message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came along and gave you access to the whole planet all at the same time. So why not use the Internet as a way to communicate directly and authentically to the marketplace? Then I will have satisfied at least one portion of my job.”

Blogging doesn’t just communicate with the marketplace, though. Sun’s CEO also uses his company blog to communicate with the more than 32,000 Sun employees. When they have questions about business decisions, Jonathan can respond to both the company and the marketplace via his blog. “If you are going to lead, you must communicate,” he said in the interview. “You can communicate in many different ways, through your actions, through your products. The way I communicate is by using the spoken and written word.”

Schwartz is a genuine blogger — he’s very much against having the PR people do any writing for him. But do they mind that they’re not in control of his message? “I don’t think I’ve ever terrified our PR department, but I’ve terrified our securities department once or twice, and they’ve been very quick about telling me to put in a safe harbor statement at the beginning of the post, and then they make an SEC filing based on what I just said, but now we’re very practiced about this and that’s no longer the norm. I can get away with a link to a safe harbor statement now.”

The CEO isn’t the only blogger at Sun — more than 4300 people at the company, from marketing and HR staffers to high-level engineers and managers have blogs on the Sun Microsystems corporate site. Some of them are in languages other than English, and many of them are fascinating not solely as an insight into the internals of one of information technology’s founding companies, but as a collection of smart people who love to share ideas about a wide range of subjects. “The most terrifying day for me as a blogger was when our general counsel started writing a blog,” Schwartz said jokingly. “Actually that’s not true — he’s very thoughtful. And guess who reads his blog? Other general counsels.”

The rest of the interview covers Sun’s MySQL purchase and the integration of two businesses into one, Sun’s open source strategy, cloud computing, how giving away products for free gives insight into the market and access to potential hardware and services customers, utility computing, the evolution of high-performance computing, the “black box” data center, efficiency and power consumption (”[electricity] is the number two expense, next to people”), and how blogging helps inform people about all of these issues.

Good stuff!

If you’re a CEO, you’d do well to emulate Jonathan’s approach to business blogging.

Business Blog Consulting’s founder, Rick Bruner, hasn’t been seen or heard from lately, at least not here. I was beginning to wonder if he still existed. Lo and behold, I found he does. His name is attached to a new report released this month by DoubleClick, where he serves as Director of Research.

The report, titled Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth (PDF), talks about how marketers can make use of word-of-mouth marketing by “influencing the influencers,” those whose buying decisions tend to have greater impact on friends, family, and associates than others.

For any company doing business in Arabic-speaking countries or communities a good feed to have is for the Maktoob Business Blog.

Online since December 2005, the blog covers aspects of business in the Middle East, with a stated aim of focusing on marketing, advertising and media. There are several contributors.

The blog is a product of Maktoob Business - whose website banner claims that the group has the world’s largest Arabic community.

A recent blog post reports on Maktoob’s newly-launched (beta) Arabic search engine, Araby.com, which Maktoob claims has a number of competitive advantages over the Arabic version of the engines developed first for English:

• optimized to deliver Arabic-language results from Arabic sources
• specialized search channels including Arabic news sites, photos, blogs and forums
• a dedicated channel for searching Islamic topics

The press release here provides more detail and some pr elaboration.

Not being able to read Arabic, for me the Araby.com site is a closed book. But could Araby.com be a serious Arabic competitor to Google and Yahoo! A contender in its rather large niche? This blog post by one of the developers, Isam Bayazidi, sounds a cautionary note - it’s beta, he’s saying:

One thing for sure, Araby.com, and the verticals in it have a long way to go with development. We only released early to give users a peak into what is cooking, and get feedback on it.

An interesting development transpired here at BBC, a blog conversation broke out.  BBC contributor Stephan Spencer’s post PR Firms Comment Spamming? began a small conversation with the VP of Connors Communications.  Stephan had assumed a comment left on his blog about the long tail was a PR firm touting the latest client’s software program.  Although Stephan was mistaken in his assumption, through the use of blog mining or RSS (now I’m assuming), Mike Levin the person that left the comment, was able to correct his mistake.  In fact Mike was touting the application he had developed for Connors Communications. 

An open conversation was the result, and although Stephan and Mike may disagree on the use of comments on a blog, it is clear that their exchange was civil, and exactly what companies can use a blog to develop, an open commuincation with their customer or clients. 

Sorry Mike, now it’s my turn to provide some feedback.  After going to the Connors website, I wanted to rush to read your blog since you had indicated you were a passionate blogger in your comment.  I looked far and wide and could not seem to locate that blog.  On a whim I decided to check out the hard to find navigational site map link and searched a long time again before I found the link to your company blog.  You are correct by stating in the comments here:

I read many blogs, and sometimes I am compelled to leave comments, just as comments on our blog are welcome. I think if you read a few of my blog posts, you will find me to be sincere and on the level.

I read a few of your blog posts and you are definitely on the level and sincere.  The problem or at least what made it difficult was the navigation to your blog.  If you don’t make it easy to access those blog posts people may never get to find your wisdom.  A simple “Read Our Weblog” button or link in the top left with the rest of the navigation would prove to be beneficial to you and Connors Communications.

Great job gentleman and lets keep up the blogging conversation.

From iMediaConnection this morning comes some hints at how to track the buzz around you and your business on the blogosphere.  The tips and techniques are good ones, but they miss a couple important things.  First let’s look at the metrics they suggest:

• Technorati: Blogs linking to your site
• Technorati: Total incoming links to your site
• Bloglines: Citation search total
• Analytics: Pageviews
• Analytics: New Visitors
• Analytics: Repeat visitors
• Analytics: Referrals
• Analytics: Organic
• Analytics: Direct
• Datasource: New Members/Subscribers/Customers
• Datasource: Revenues from (direct sales/affiliates/partners/resellers/etc.)
• Alexa: Weekly rank
• Email: Opens
• Email: Clickthroughs
• Email: Forwards

Super.  Lot’s more here than just bloggy buzz, but let’s run with it.  Since I’m in charge of the metrics stuff at Qumana, well I’m usually up to my elbows in all this data.  So … what’s missing?  Well first an RSS reader.  The blogosphere is about immediacy if nothing else and you have to keep on top of it.  You need to subscribe to the RSS feeds provided by Technorati, Google, etc to be able to react and contribute to the conversation.  Bloglines and Lektora (disclosure I work for the company that makes Lektora) are two good choices.  Then for buzz and conversation measurement I really like BlogPulse.  Here is an example of a BlogPulse trend search comparing me (Tris Hussey), Debbie Weil, and Rick Bruner:

What this shows is that, well, sorry Rick … but no one is talking about you.  I tend to be talked more about than Debbie, except recently because Debbie just launched her book (man I gotta get cracking!).  Imagine doing this for your brand, CEO, competitors.  Something like this:

This compares Qumana (my company) to Ecto and Microsoft’s new Live Writer.  As you can see Qumana is talked about more than Ecto, but Live Writer is clearly a blogosphere darling at the moment.

Bottom line: check out the analytics article (there are good suggestions there), start subscribing to RSS, and add BlogPulse to your toolkit for some fast measurements on the bloggy buzz

Tags: buzz metrics, blog metric, buzz mesurement, buzz marketing, RSS

According to a recent announcement by the US Department of Defense, a new study of blogs, to receive $450,000 in funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is not about warblogging but about what sort of help blog research may provide in ‘fighting the war on terrorism’.

Two scientists at Framingham, Mass. Versatile Information Systems Inc., Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, will be managing the project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information”.

Heady stuff.

I share some of blogger Tim Oren’s concern over the ‘ontologically-based’ part of the project description and the possible implication of a ‘one-theory-fits-all’ approach, especially in terms of cultural difference. But as Oren observes, there could be some useful civilian spinoff as well as militarily applicable outcomes.

I looked for signs of a blog, either corporate or individual, on the Versatile Information Systems website, but to no avail. Without knowing whether or not the scientists blog, I wondered which would be better for a scientific study of blogging, for the scientists to have practical, personal experience of blogging, or not?

And as a former public servant and sometime consultant to government, I wonder what possibilities this story suggests for further blogging research/consultancy in the government space?

Recently JupiterResearch dropped a media release that has the social media scene buzzing. And well it should for the prestigious JupiterResearch’s study revealed that “… 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.”

That’s significant. Actually, I found that to be a little too signifcant.

According the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (written by Chris Andersen of Wired and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext) Wiki to as of April 18, 2006 29 (5.8%) of Fortune 500 companies had a blog. If JupiterResearch’s analysis is correct and “nearly 70% of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006″ a lot of Fortune 500s (not to mention other large companies) are are going to be pretty busy building blogs during the next six month.

Even though I admit to a drink of that kool-aid every now and again, this sounded strange. I shot an email off to Peter Arnold Associates (PR agency) explaining that I was working in the social media space, was a blogger and wanted to post their client’s findings. I explained I found the analysis odd and asked for clarification on the methodolgy, how JupiterResearch defined “corporations” and “large companies” and how they came to their conclusions.

I received two lovely responses. The first: “Let me check in with someone on the research team at JupiterResearch to find answers to your questions. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I hear.”

The second: “Information about JupiterResearch reports are available to accredited members of the press for free and clients.

After looking at your blog link JupiterResearch has decided not to fulfill your request for more information since the blog* is closely tied with your company that serves as a consultancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, I didn’t realize that your company and blog were so closely affiliated.

If you’d like more information about becoming a client or purchasing a report, please let me know.”

Bloggers have gotten called on the carpet for jumping the gun and posting without fact checking. While we’re not journalists, the majority of business bloggers do feel an obligation to their readers to present accurate information.

BBC readers, I tried to find out the story behind the numbers for you before I posted that I thought these findings were .. shall we say out of the ball park optimistic. Based on the information presented in their media release, I caution you to look at JupiterResearch’s conclusions with with a few grains of salt.

If anyone has read the report and can explain how “nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006″ please drop a comment. I sure would like to know.

JupiterResearch has published a new report, “RSS Comes of Age” that finds 63 percent of large companies planning to syndicate content via RSS by the end of this year. This growth is surprising in contrast to the low “perceived” adoption rate of RSS.

“The primary challenge to greater adoption is a lack of experience with RSS and resources to deploy it,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. “However, recent offerings from e-mail service providers (ESP) and RSS service providers are lowering the barrier for feed management, deployment and measurement.”

Reading this summary reminds me of the research report offered by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight (pdf):

“27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.”

So perhaps this explains the use of “percieved” in reference to adoption rates? Many users of RSS don’t realize they are. Regardless, RSS is a fantastic tool for communication and marketing and is one of the most distinguishing features of a blog.

Analysis firm Cymphony and PR agency Porter Novelli have partnered to conduct research into how companies are executing their corporate blog strategy with a research survey called Corporate Blog - Best Practice. If you’re involved with business or corporate blogging, this survey is for you.

Jim Nail of Cymphony emailed me the details:

“The survey is delving into some of the unglamorous but important questions around corporate blogging: who actually manages the blog? Who actually writes the posts? How often? What tools do they use to monitor blogs? How often? There’s lots of talk about the reasons why companies should have blogs and what types of information they should include, but I haven’t seen anything about these practical day-to-day implementation issues that companies need to work out to effectively manage this channel.”

After you take the survey, you have the option of providing contact information to receive a executive summary of the findings and an invitation to a webinar where the full report will be provided.

After getting Jim’s email, I recalled the Blogger Survey conducted by Technorati and Edelman last year that provided some interesting insights focusing on how bloggers interact with companies and PR firms. The Corporate Blog - Best Practice survey focuses more on how businesses use blogs and it will be interesting to compare the results with previous research.

If the name Jim Nail is familiar, I mentioned him in an earlier post on blog buzz from a panel at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. Jim was at Forrester for 8 years prior to joining Cymphony.

Interesting report from the Onalytica blog, measuring who the top 25 most influential business bloggers are, with full disclosure on their methodology for defining ‘influential.

Not sure I agree with their results, purely because they have a mix of blog networks (Corante), multi-author blogs (Businessblogconsulting) and famous single bloggers like Steve Rubel @ Micropersuasion.

Download the PDF of the report here.

The Results

Technorati Tags: blog research, blogosphere, business blogging, influence

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled “RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology.” The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you’ll see what I mean)
The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)
There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on ‘what do do next’ with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Freerange communications, Marqui, RSS, whitepaper

My friend and colleague Paul Chaney is working on a blogging book with another author and recently asked for some advice on schedules and how to work on a multi-author book. I responded and thought it would be interesting to pull the response here into the public eye too…

Paul commented:

“The book is scheduled for release in the fall and they want a completed manuscript by the end of March. Not having had this experience I have no clue as to whether that’s a reasonable time frame, but we aim to please.”

First off, congratulations! There’s little as satisfying as publishing a book and bumping into people who have read it!

Having said that, I do believe that a perfect egalitarian coauthorship doesn’t work and that there needs to be a lead writer whose voice ends up permeating the entire manuscript. That’s what Shel did with Naked Conversations, for example.

You need to balance the rewrites and work, of course, so it’s still equitable, but books that are collections of essays, for example, are always spotty and plagued by bad writing, making it hard to find the gems.

Further, I would assume that each chapter is going to go back and forth between coauthors at least twice. You brainstorm points and cases, your coauthor adds to it, you write a first draft, they add their content, you polish and send it in. (Or vice versa).

Once you’ve sent in the manuscript, remember that you’re both part of a bigger team of editorial folk and that you’ll have AT LEAST two or three more people adding their 2-3 cents worth, including a tech editor [1], copyeditor, and development editor. Value all their comments (it’s easy to get mad at them) and respond to each query with the question of “they represent the reader. How can I improve this for the reader?” rather than the more common, but wrong-headed “stupid editor. What do they know about this subject?”

Finally, once it’s all done, remember that’s when your work STARTS, not ends. Successful books are a success because the author(s) push them, not beacuse the company gets behind them. Most publishing companies assume everything will be mediocre and only put marketing $$ behind those books that are starting to demonstrate the traits of a success.

One implication: be extremely generous with review copies. Any visibility in your market segment makes it easier to get more marketing attention and, of course, is good for your book sales overall [2]

Hope this is helpful stuff!

Notes:

[1] I do tech editing of books, particularly those with a business focus if anyone’s interested, and have tech edited at least 30 books in the last decade. It’s fun and a nice chance to help improve a product. [References]

[2] And this is why if any one of you would like a review copy of my nineteenth book, Growing Your Business with Google, and have a legitimate outlet for a review, even just on your well-read weblog, please contact me and I’ll forward your request along to the publicists at Penguin. I’ve sent out at least 50 copies of the book to reviewers at this point in time.
by this point in time…

It seems that every virtual corner I turn there’s talk about tracking the buzz from 2.0 social media tools e.g., blogs, boards, Flickr, etc. The marketing research profession is entering an exciting (although some may find it uncomfortable) phase in the development of data collection and analysis techniques. The field (literally!) has gone from asking questions via door-to-door interviewing to listening to virtual conversations.

Granted, the use of consumer generated media (CGM) as a credible research tool, is in its infancy (historically researchers seem to move cautiously…look how long it took for firms to embrace online research); however, consumer generated media is too rich to overlook. Some companies are beginning to explore CGM as a supplement to traditional research for information about:

• Brand buzz -who.what.where
• Competitive intelligence
• Product development and improvement
• Pre launch buzz
• Early warning crisis management
• Advertising effectiveness
• Voice of the customer

I understand that Chrysler is using CGM to track trends. They’ve gone from mining data at a high level - sensibilities about specific models to a more granular level of information about features and attributes. The next step is better understanding the influencers and how the information flows.

Just yesterday I heard from a reliable source that a popular Atlanta beverage company is reviewing research firms that monitor digital conversations.
However, for CMG to become accepted as a mainstream, credible technique marketing research professionals will be challenged to:

• Incorporate CGM information into the findings from traditional methodologies
• Develop a standard of credibility that is acceptable by practitioners and academics
• Determine what is white noise and what is significant information without sanitizing the data

Here’s one to ponder …

Information is any difference that makes a difference. - Gregory Batson

Technorati Tags: Marketing_Research, CGM, Consumer_Generated_Media, Blogs

Earlier this year, I put out a call on this site as to how many of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging. I guessed "somewhere in the 3-6% range currently." Yesterday I got an email from Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, saying that he had wondered the same thing over dinner with Doc Searls. More specifically, they wondered whether companies that were thriving did not blog because they had less to gain from such openness while companies fighting to grow or regain market share were more inclined to blog, and whether this was a trend that could be correlated to companies’ business performance. So, Anderson set some Wired interns to the task and came up with this post describing what they found. Further, together with Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, they created the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to keep track of the trend. (I’m gratified to note that my original estimate seems to be holding true: the collaborative effort has identified public blogs at 4% of the Fortune 500 firms.)

Tim Manners, publisher of Reveries ‘Cool News’, has released a blogging survey in the face of some of the negative blog related data coming out of AdAge and Forbes.  The objective is to get the marketers’ and agencies’ takes on the real skinny of what’s going on with blogs and gauge the sentiments of the marketers who have to defend ‘the brands and the lives that blogs allegedly destroy’, according to the Forbes article.

In an email to Cool News Today subscribers, Tim put it this way.

In view of the rapidly growing impact of blogs, we have developed a survey to
get underneath the hype and find out how marketers (both brand and agency)
actually view blogs — as a potential useful tool or lurking danger — and to
what extent, in fact, our readers currently monitor blogs as the Forbes
article recommends:

Take the survey here:
http://response.surveyincite.com/survey/18667.jsp

The results of this survey will be available to all participants to
judge for themselves whether they are ahead or behind on the blogging curve.

There have been a number of blog surveys this year but none has really given us the ‘complete truth’ or the whole picture.  However, I think that the more of these we do and the higher the response rates, the closer we get to having a real understanding of what the blogosphere means to the advertising and marketing community.

A few months ago Technorati invited over 30,000 subscribers to its email newsletter to participate in a 18 question survey on blogging. There were 821 respondents.

The survey found that most bloggers blog to position themselves as an authority in their field and were fairly skeptical of corporate blogs, noting more trust in individual employee blogs.

You can view much of the raw results in tablular and graphical format on the Edelman site and some analysis on the Edelman blog. Technorati has published their own summary findings of the survey and eMarketer has published their take as well.

eMarketer is also offering a new report on business blogging:

The Business of Blogging report aggregates the latest data from Blogads,
Forrester Research, Gallup, Harris Interactive, InsightExpress, Perseus
Development, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Quris, Technorati, TNS
and many others—with eMarketer’s objective, unbiased analysis to give you the
information you need to make well-informed business decisions on the future of
online marketing.

Traditional media seems committed to sending out mixed messages about business blogging:
Fortune - No escaping the blog

Forbes - Attach of the Blogs

BusinessWeek - Blogs will Change your Business

Reports like “The Business of Blogging” seem more attractive to those looking for objective insight. But is it objective?  I have not purchased the report and if anyone else has, I would be curious about your thoughts on it.

According to a newly released report from Pew Internet & American Life Project teens are very blog savvy.  According to the report, 19% of teens are blogging, and 38% of teens are reading blogs. The number of teen blog readers translates to 8 million young adults.

Teens are adopting the use of the internet for many functions including downloading music, using IM, making online purchases, and more importantly to the blogosphere, they are deemed to be "content creators".  The study reflects

Today’s online teens live in a world filled with self authored customized and on demand content much of which is easily replicated, manipulated and redistributable.  The internet and digital publishing technologies have given them tools to create, remix and share content on a scale that had previously only been accessible to the professional gatekeepers of broadcast, print, and recorded media outlets.

What does this mean for the future?

Contuinue Reading

In an article entitled What Blogs Cost American Business, AdAge.com contends that in 2005 alone, employees will waste 551,000 years reading blogs at work.

Some interesting factoids:

• 35 millions workers (25%) visit blogs and spend on average 3.5 hours a week at them.
• Time spent in the office on non-office work blogs is equivalent to 2.3 million jobs.
• U.S. workers will wast 2.3 million business work years this year alone.

What the the article doesn’t mention is if these lost hours are coming out of actual productivity, or the time we spent looking for good travel deals or checking last night’s sports scores, and will Expedia and ESPN suffer because of this.

It also doesn’t talk about the fact that most American workers work longer hours, work through lunch and take our laptops and Blackberries home with us. Don’t we deserve some time to blog off?

This story found via Blogcritics.org.

Sorry, I can’t let this one pass. As much as I’d like to believe the reported results of the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey released this week, I can’t. The survey reports that 89% of companies are blogging. And that corporate adoption of blogging is entering the hyper growth phase.

Here’s the rub. The conclusions are based on 140 respondents. That’s far too small a number from which to draw such a sweeping conclusion. In addition, the way the survey was conducted taints the results. DoubleClick research director Rick Bruner (yes, Rick is the brains behind this blog!) spoke with Mike Sigal of Guidewire Group to find out more. Rick emailed me the following:

"I think the sample size is less of an issue than the sample recruitment methodology…

Oh, and not so coincidentally, perhaps, iUpload sells an enterprise blogging platform. Download the  iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here.

…He [Mike] said they sent out invitations from some
mailing list that should have been representative of the Fortune 500…
But they also put the word out to lots of [bloggers], who posted about
the survey on their blogs. Meaning that a significant number of
respondents were self-selected. Hence, it’s likely that companies who
are particularly tuned into business blogs were more likely to respond."

Makes
sense, doesn’t it? I know I was one of the respondents who took the
survey and I suspect every blogging "consultant" or expert also took it
just to see what questions were being asked. Add up the number of non-corporate respondents to the survey and I wager you’re well under 100 statistically valid responses.

In comparison, I got over 700 responses [PDF of results] to a survey I ran last summer on business blogging. The clearest result from that survey: Time is the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging.
Other results: 55% of respondents said blogging will become a
"must-have" corporate marketing tool. But it’s not quite here yet. My
survey was publicized to the 15,000-plus subscribers to my
e-newsletter, WordBiz Report.

Download the survey
You can download the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey here. Read with a grain of salt. Then do leave a comment below. Would love to hear your thoughts.

An old industry acquaintance Jason Throckmorton, who reminds me he once did PR for Flycast (there’s a blast from the past!), writes me to ask help promoting a client’s survey about corporate blogging. I get a fair number of requests to link to surveys on this topic, not all of which I bother with, but this one looks interesting, particularly given that the producers of BlogOn are behind it. Jason writes:

I’m writing to give you a heads up about a survey focused on corporate blogging that Guidewire Group (producers of BlogOn) is doing with one of our clients called iUpload. We’re asking folks like yourself with strong ties to the blogging/marketing/PR communities to help spread the word.

We¹re going to be announcing highlights of the survey at next month’s BlogOn conference. The goal is to shed light on market demand for corporate blogging solutions, emerging best practices and the role of blogs in key enterprise functions, as well as to identify barriers inhibiting adoption in the marketplace. Obviously, lots of overlap with what you’re covering.

In addition to directly receiving the highlights of the survey, participants can also register for a chance to win an iPod nano or a complimentary pass to the event.

Gartner released yesterday its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The research firm has pegged Corporate Blogging and RSS as being two years away from mainstream adoption. For now, both are tumbling into Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment (along with wikis and desktop search) as a result of too much media buzz. If you believe Gartner, Corporate Blogging is already sooo… last year (2004).

They’ve got a point. The media rumble about Corporate Blogging is almost deafening by now. It’s not a “new” story anymore. Which is not to say that blogging isn’t still a “new” thing to many companies.

At any rate, the five stages of hype make a lot of sense. It works something like this: new technologies get overhyped in the beginning; then they go out of favor; eventually they mature and are adopted by the mainstream but by that time they’re no longer news.

The five stages are: Technology Trigger, Peak of Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. Oh, and podcasting is on the upswing, according to Gartner. It’s sliding up the Peak of Expectations. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?

The way I understand it, the hype cycle is measuring the buzz as well as the adoption rate. It
doesn’t necessarily correspond to the long-term utility - or success -
of a phenomenon like Corporate Blogging. Only time will tell.

Read more about Corporate Blogging’s downward slide into the Trough of Disillusionment…