Study finds that only 16 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public facing blogs

Only 16 percent of the Fortune 500 companies surveyed have a publicly facing blog, according to a new study by Nora Ganim Barns, Ph.D., Chancellor Professor of Marketing at UMass Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO at Financial Insite. The writers called these companies "early adopter," a shocking moniker considering blogs have been mainstream for years and are the oldest and most established social media tool.

Not surprising technology companies lead the way with eight blogs including Microsoft, Oracle, EMC and Xerox. It shouldn't be a shock that all of these companies sell content management products. To arrive at this number, the researchers simply looked for a blog and checked if it had been updated in the last 12 months. The study did not look at social media inside corporations and it's not clear if they counted personal blogs from inside a corporation to the outside world. Other interesting findings included:

Of the 81 companies that had blogs,

• 90 percent allowed comments and have RSS feeds (I wonder why the remaining 10 percent wouldn't).
• 21 percent were also providing podcasts for download.
• 28 percent had a link to the corporate Twitter account on the company blog.

If these numbers are to be believed, it shows just how far corporations have to go in recognizing the power of social media to help carry their message and brand to the world at large. The researchers conclude that Fortune 500 companies are adopting social media at a rate much slower than other businesses. The fact that almost 85 percent of the largest companies are ignoring this powerful communications method is a shame, and it shows how much education is still needed around social media tools in general.

To learn more:
- download the study findings.

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