2006 Trends to Watch Part VII: The Empire Strikes Back

Chris Anderson has a post describing a new collaboration between Wired magazine and Socialtext to track the number of Fortune 500 companies that are blogging. They found that only 4% are doing so. Studying the Fortune 500 is always important, but they're not the innovators in the blog world.

To date, most of the companies that have put points up on the blog scoreboard have been small to medium-sized firms. These are companies like Stormhoek, which saw its sales double from blogging. Perhaps the one notable exception is Microsoft.

In 2006 the Empire - e.g. large corporations - will strike back in a big way in an effort to make sure they don't lose the online word of mouth game to the small fries. Will they be successful? Some will, others definitely will not. The keys to success (and I'm borrowing a page from Seth Godin's book here) are to 1) find passionate audiences with a distinct world views, 2) to tell them stories in an authentic voice and 3) blog with a higher holy calling that provides consistent value and differentiates them from others.