Business blogging tips and news for professional bloggers

How quickly is the number of corporate blogs increasing?

I'm not going to answer that question right now.  But I ask it so we can examine it from a different point of view.

This is a history student's plea for us all to remember the importance of primary sources.  A primary source is the horse's mouth.  A secondary source is what someone tells you about the horse's mouth.  (Of course you can take that person's word and turn it into a primary source by analyzing it instead of the horse's mouth, but that's another story.)

So when JupiterResearch issues a press release stating that "35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year" and that "nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006," we need to look carefully at what claims are or are not being made, and with what evidence as proof.

If you opt to buy the report, you'll see a preliminary page which explains that "concept reports are usually around 5 pages long," while "Vision reports are usually around 20 to 25 pages long."

Fard Johnmar at HealthcareVox spent $750 to access the report and, to say the least, was not impressed.

Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing describes my frustration by saying that the JR press release "has the blogosphere buzzing like bees to a hive of honey."  That is, it smells like honey and looks honey.  But instead of insisting on tasting it, or even on talking with someone who has, too many bloggers are content to go for the "buzz" traffic by quickly and haphazardly linking to the press release or to someone else's report of it, and then zipping off to the next news item.

To be fair, the pace at which businesses are adopting blogging isn't nearly as important as the degree to which they strive to use every tool at their disposal (including blogs, perhaps) to enhance their business and to benefit their actual and potential customers.  But as long as we're focusing on blogs as a tool to make all that happen, we ought to strive for accuracy.  So we need to remember to be responsible investigators and reporters.

On that note, we ought to be careful about accepting too readily the data found at the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki.  I'm not going to analyze its accuracy here; my point is simply that we shouldn't assume it's infallible simply because it's a wiki, or because it's there, or because it's the only (or the best-known) resource of its kind. 

The only way to truly know the truth is to find it yourself or to find someone who has it.