Announcing the Fortune 500 Business Blog Index

Short form: In collaboration with Socialtext, we've created a wiki that tracks which of the Fortune 500 is blogging. We found that only 3 4% of the F500 are doing so. Check it out here.

Long form: Earlier this year I was at a dinner with Doc Searls and we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don't. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn't. Sun blogs and Intel doesn't. GM blogs and Toyota doesn't. And so on.

    Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction. So companies on the way up don't want to mess with their success by introducing a new lens on the enterprise that isn't controlled by the PR department. But companies on the way down are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers. [Update: Doc has posted more background on this here.]

    Hmm, I thought. That's testable. Let's look at which of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging and compare their past twelve month share performance with those that aren't. If this theory stands up, the blogging members of the F500 will have underperformed the nonblogging members. And then we can also see if blogging makes a difference going forward, by continuing to follow the two cohorts.

    So  I asked our research department to check it out. And they quickly discovered that the problem is that there's no good list of F500 company blogs.

    Business blogging, as we defined it, is:

Active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.

    This site has a list of F500 companies with blogs, but doesn't distinguish between internal and external ones (and doesn't link to any of them so they can be checked). This wiki has a linked list of blogs, but it's a bit of a mishmash, ranging from tiny companies to big ones, with some non-profits thrown in as well. (The NewPRwiki also has a list of CEO blogs, which is better, but still doesn't fit the bill.)

    So we decided to create a list ourselves, and put the ace Wired interns on the case. But they, too, discovered that it's tough to do right, given ambiguity about what is or isn't a proper business blog, what's still active and so on.

    Nevertheless, they did come up with a rough version, which you can see in this spreadsheet. By the above definition, they found only 16 18 members (3 4%) of the Fortune 500 with business blogs. [UPDATE: the wiki's working already; contributors found two more companies blogging, including (ulp!) IBM. Don't know how we missed that. The spreadsheet and the share price performance stats have been updated] And, for what it's worth with such a small sample size, the average trailing 12-month share performance of the blogging members was +5 +4%, while the performance of non-blogging members was +19%. So although the statistics aren't good enough to confirm Doc's theory, they do point in the right direction.

    The next step was to improve the data. So we've decided to open source the project. In collaboration with Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, we've created the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. It's a wiki'd version of the above spreadsheet that anyone can edit, adding new Fortune 500 blogs as they're found or revising existing entries. It's released under a Creative Commons attribution license, so anyone is free to use it any way as long as they point back to the wiki.

    Over time, as the list gets more robust, we'll add the share price performance back in and turn it into a Business Blogging Index so you can see if blogging is indeed correlated to company performance (and who knows, maybe someday some smart mutual fund will actually turn it into a fund you can buy). Have at it!

Comments

[Kevin Marks]

Apple has a few blogs, including

[Nathan T. Freeman]

If this is your result, then your methodology is problematic at best. IBM has dozens of blogs. You can find a list here: http://smokey.rhs.com/web/ibm/hhbg2ib.nsf/web/index.html

"Ace Wired interns?" Gimme a break.

[Kevin Marks]

Evidently your comment form disliked my link.

http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/

is the Surfin' Safari blog at Apple, which does fit your criteria, despite the generally blogging-hostile culture there.

[azeem]

ugh. so what? test failed dramatically.

[azeem]

wasn't meant to be crabby but just what it said on the tin: a huge 'so what?' but you've forced me to re-read the posting (including the bit I skimmed) and while I still think it fails the 'so what' test, i appreciate that you framed a hypothesis that you wanted to test.

so here is why it fails the 'so what' test: blogging is currently this little tiny-thing on the corporate horizon (compared to the big things like growth, Sox, offshoring, etc). the numbers of firms which blog are very low, but you can bet that their have been discussions through the other Fortune 500 about whether they ought to support 'corporate blogs'.

so i think a more useful approach would be this:
-- talk to a sample of Fortune 500 firms which run corporate blogs (per your definition) and which don't and figure out what they hope to achieve by blogging, what decision process they went through and why they made the decision they did.

that piece of qualititative research might help us understand what hypothesis we need to test.

while your initial data supports your hypothesis, their are dozens of variables you haven't controlled for which could account for the correlation.

[chris anderson]

Azeem,

Funny you should mention that. Because this research project was originally intended to feed an article in Wired, we did indeed have a writer talk to the companies blogging and not blogging and ask them why. But because we hadn't got the underlying data rigorous enough for our satisfaction, we weren't comfortable running it. Perhaps, once the wiki is properly populated, we'll restart the project and run the piece to give the qualitative analysis you suggest, too.

[Jeremy Wright]

Chris, you really, really, really need to note that this is public blogging.

Everyone linking is saying that only 4% of Fortune 500s are blogging, which is patently false. Intel has hundreds of blogs internally, for instance, as do many, many other Fortune 500s (Mitsubishi springs to mind, since they've retooled much of their internal marketing to leverage blogs).

I'm glad you guys are doing this and all, but since it's a wiki, shouldn't it have a space for internal blogging as well?

[chris anderson]

Jeremy,

I think we've been as clear as we can be here and on the wiki--we've given our definition of business blogs as public blogs up top. We're very specifically looking at blogs as an external communications tool and an alternative vehicle for corporate messaging. Using blogs internally as another communications and organization tool is an entirely different thing. But I imagine that would make for an interesting Wiki project too; I hope someone starts that.

Chris

[Scott Wilder]

Interesting blog:

I manage QuickBooks Online Community and collaboration team. We have a few other company blogs too (even another QuickBooks one or two)

Quickbooks.blogs.com
Quickbooks_online_blog.typepad.com/
Quicken.typepad.com/

And .. according to Business Week, we have the first public facing WIKI from a Fortune 500 company:

http://www.taxalmanac.org

[Scott Wilder]

I stand correct. Intuit is not a Fortune 500 company.

[Kevin Marks]

Chris, Suw Charman has been doing a lot of research on 'dark blogs' - those inside the firewall. Some of this has already been published.

[m]

How do blogs affect revenue. They don't. How do they sell product, they don't.

What do they achieve? They let anyone make uninformed announcements to the world. They give the impression that one persons personal belief is truth. Any company that let's it's employeees blog, on company time, is obviously not focused on job #1. i.e. Serving customers and shareholders.

e.g. #1 - Micrsoft's Vista might evenutally be delivered about 2 years late with 1/2 the features chopped. But the company still finds time to let most of it's employees fill the internet with useless information.

[J.]

So what does it say about a company when they're successful, but still have a public corporate blog?

[Chris Anderson]

J-

It's says that this is just a statistical correlation, not a hard-and-fast rule. I would hope that eventually the correlation will flip, and blogging will be a sign of strength.

Since business blogging seems to reflect a whole bunch of qualities I think are good for companies to have--transparency, good community relations, passionate employees, engaged customers, trust in its employees, decentralized communications, etc--I would expect it to correlate with good performance over time.

But now, in the early days, it's still unclear how best to do it and what effect it will have. Companies that outperform the F500 average and still have a blog are clearly either very good, very brave, or they're simply tech companies for whom it's expected, whether they like it or not (Google, which owns Blogger, comes to mind).

-Chris

[John Cass]

One of my goals in conducting the Corporate Blogging Survey was to determine who was blogging, by that I mean what is the occupation of the people who blog in companies? From conducting interviews with companies like Macromedia, and Microsoft in 2004 I had discovered that product development was an important part of corporate blogging.

I am now wondering if I could test my hypothesis that a company’s product builders rather than product promoters are the people who should be blogging? Maybe I’d be able to add some sections to the wiki and ask companies to list the number of employees who are blogging by their role in company?

I note that people are already adding their blogs and titles in the company sections.

[David Kline]

I was the writer Wired hired to do the article on why companies blog. It's true that some companies openly started blogging to address corporate communications and image problems that traditional PR methods had failed to redress. GM, Boeing and Microsoft are all cases in point, as I note in my own blog post on the subject at http://www.blogrevolt.com/archives/2005/12/do_companies_st.htm.

But clearly others blog -- Sun and IBM -- not because of any significant corporate malaise but rather because they are closely involved in network culture and wanted to extend and strengthen relations with customers, developers, etc.

Personally, I think share price performance is a poor gauge at this point in time for understanding the motivators to corporate blogging -- it's simply too early and the percentage of F500 blogs too small.

But the fact that so few large companies have embraced blogging as yet -- two years after political and media blogging showed the power of this communications form -- is highly revealing, in my opinion.

Fortune 500 companies are still scared or at least uncertain about blogging. Business Week says companies need to "catch up or catch you later," but Forbes says blogs can "wreck brands and destroy lives."

No wonder senior executives are hesitant to jump in.

Which at the intuitive level suggests that at least *many* companies won't jump into the blogging fray (right now) unless driven to by communications and image problems that traditional PR methods have failed to solve.

[Lisa Calhoun]

Fascinating research! As a professional writer, I'm often approached about writing content for blogs. My company, Write2Market, is intimately involved in writing content that drives lead-to-sales conversions, so I want a deeper understanding of the business case for blogging before attempting it for clients (which is how I landed at thelongtail). I created a survey as to put numbers to the stories we hear about business blogging. The survey results are shared instantly after the multiple-choice questions are answered:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=781411641550

Thanks for sharing your own fascinating research on this subject--
Lisa

[jeff nolan]

One small point on the F500 aspect of this is that the Fortune 500 list is U.S. companies only. SAP has blogs, including a full roster of executive blogs, and if we were included in the F500 list we would be somewhere around #190.

[Bill Prado]

Great Blog. Illustrates well the power Blogs can have as a resource in global business. This is the reason that I selected Bloggers as the participant pool in my doctoral research (BTW, those of you who work in international business are welcomed to participate in the survey at: http://campus.greenmtn.edu/faculty/wprado/) Again, great blog!

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The Fortune 500 Business Blog Index just launched

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