By John Cass, Backbone Media & SNCR Research Fellow & Advisory Board Member
Chris Anderson of Wired and Ross Mayfield of SocialText developed the Fortune 500 blogging wiki to track the number of Fortune 500 companies blogging; the number is small at 24 or 4.6%. But when you consider the percentage of overall companies that are blogging, is 4.6% really a small number?
With 21 million companies in the US, if we used the percentage number of Fortune 500 firms blogging, 4.6%, for the total percentage of companies blogging that would mean 966,000 companies would be running a blog. If we take out the 15.5 million companies that don’t have payrolls, that leaves only 5.5 million companies in the US with payrolls. 4.6% of 5.5 million would be 253,000 companies blogging. See these statistics from the US Government Census on businesses.
David Sifry of Technorati in his post, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth,” states that the blogosphere as a whole continues to double every 5.5 months. David Sifry estimated that there were 5,000 corporate blogs in October 2004 in this post, Oct 2004, “State of the Blogosphere: Corporate Bloggers.” It’s been 17 months since Oct 2004; therefore if the number of corporate blogs increases at the same rate as blogs in general we might say the number of corporate blogs is around 40,000 corporate blogs. Remember, I pulled this number out of the air, and I’d be glad to hear of any better estimates. From the research my colleague Kristine Munroe and I conducted in the corporate blogging survey in June of 2005 that number seems rather high, it was tough to find a lot of corporate blogs. If the actual number of companies blogging is 0.1 or 0.2% of all companies, or 0.73% of all firms with payrolls. Put in perspective of the total number of firms blogging, the figure of 4.6% of Fortune 500 firms blogging is actually a large number.
The Fortune 500 blogging wiki was developed after Chris Anderson and Doc Searls had sat down to dinner and wondered why more Fortune 500 companies were not blogging. Doc hypothesized that those companies who are doing well would have more to lose from blogging than those that are not. To test Doc’s hypothesis, the Fortune 500 wiki was developed. Along with a list of companies from the Fortune 500, the wiki also tracks each company’s stock price. Over time the stock price of each company that blogs will be compared with those Fortune 500 companies that don’t blog.
Doc, Chris and Ross, I’d suggest that in addition to the question why more Fortune 500 companies are not blogging, I’d suggest we ask the question why so few smaller companies are using blogs to connect with their audiences.
The preceding was originally posted on Backbone Media’s Blog Survey Blog.
John Cass is a Research Fellow and member of the advisory board of the Society for New Communications Research. John is director of Internet Marketing Strategies for Backbone Media. John was formerly the marketing director for 48hourprint.com, an online printer based in Boston, where he helped the company dramatically reduce the company’s online cost per acquisition and managed 48hourprint.com’s marketing efforts, including pay per click, e-mail, corporate blog and print media. John has also worked for a number of software product companies; including the consumer security products industry and the web load testing industry. A member of the American Marketing Association, John Cass is the 2005/6 President of the Boston Chapter of the AMA. In 2004 he conducted a corporate blogging survey where his research revealed how such companies as Microsoft and Macromedia are using blogs to communicate with their customers.
