A UMass Dartmouth study appears to show that corporate blogging is declining, although the data is somewhat inconclusive in this regard. In fact, researcher Nora Barnes who has been following Fortune 500 company blogs since 2007 found that overall blogging remained steady at 23 percent among Fortune 500 companies between 2010 and 2011.

Although the numbers are very close for the last two years, she still interpreted this to mean that corporate blogging has peaked, and companies are moving on to other social media tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Barnes defined blogging as she has always done dating back to 2007 when she began looking at the data. "A company was counted as having a blog if they had a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months."

Fair enough, but I think perhaps how we define corporate content and how marketing departments in general deliver content, could be changing and that could account for the difference, however slight it might have been.

When I sent the report to Jeff Cutler, a Boston-based blogger who has written blogs for many corporate clients, he had this to say, "With a focused message, we're doing more content marketing than just 'blogging.'"

It sounded like Barnes was referring to a public facing corporate blog as opposed to a focused content marketing project that Cutler was referring to. It would actually be difficult to have the social media presence these companies seem to desire without some sort of content to drive the strategy. Whether you call that a blog or some other type of content, it still requires content to drive the marketing effort.

So it may be that corporate blogging has begun to wane, at least within the scope of Barnes' definition, or it may be that we are just not looking at it as blogging in the pure sense anymore. Whatever you call it, social media efforts require content.

For more information:
- see the UMass Dartmouth report

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