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.

Comments

[Jeremy Pepper]

Yes, Hugh and David Parmet rock, and have done a great job with English Cut and Stormhoek, doing that 25 percent magic.

[Mack Collier]

The corporations are still slow to turn to blogs because they can't quantify how having one or more would affect their bottom line. IMO seeing Budget's wildly successful Up Your Budget blog-only campaign will convince more corporations to incorporate blogs into their marketing strategy, than having a small company successfully use bloggers to push their products.

Budget is supposedly going to try a second blog-only campaign in the coming months. If that happens and the results are as good or better than Up Your Budget's, I think you'll see other companies jump on the blog-only campaign bandwagon. Which can only make it easier for them to eventually incorporate blogs into their marketing infrastructure.

[Rod Boothby]

I think you a right that 2006 will bring some significant changes in how big companies use both internal and external blogs.

There are some other simple reasons why it is only 4% of Fortune 500 companies today.

First, companies have not yet learnt how to blog internally.

Second, the technology isn't there yet. A Fortune 500 needs something like TypePad or Blogger in a box. Otherwise, the admin of 100,000+ internal blogs is simply going to be too difficult for most companies. Required features include access control, scripts for defining blog types and easy admin tools.