This is part 1 of 3 in a series of blog posts talking about corporate use of blogs. It’s a way for me to get extra credit for my Business Communication course and add what is hopefully valuable content to the internet.

The first section of my assignment asks me to locate and report statistical data about how many companies have blogs and use blogs. You would think with all the social media gurus out there, this information would be everywhere! Not so. Finding out how many companies use blogs has turned out to be more challenging than I thought.

According to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki on Socialtext.net, only 78 companies that make up the Fortune 500 have used blogs to communicate with their customers.  That’s only 15.6%! With the rising popularity of companies using other forms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, I’m surprised that the number of Fortune 500 companies with blogs is so low.

Technocrati’s (http://www.technocrati.com) State of the Blogosphere 2009 does a great job of analyzing the different reasons people and business use blogs, but trying to figure out out the number of blogs is, well, impossible. Their data comes from a survey of 2,828 bloggers as well as data from Lijit’s (http://www.lijit.com) 11,000 active bloggers and those bloggers’ 2.5 million connections. From what Technocrati found, only 13% of blogs are for the purpose of benefiting a business. Out of that 13%, only 4% of those blogs are for businesses other than the self-employed.

Blogging is still primarily done by people, such as myself, who blog only for the purpose of getting our thoughts and ideas into the public realm.

Related posts:

1. Business Communication (pt 2): Advantages and Disadvantages of Corporate Blogs
2. Business Communication (pt 3): Two Examples of Corporate Blogs
3. Over 1 Year of Blogging Teaches Me That I Need Purpose