Fortune 500 Slow To Blog, Faster To Embrace Other Social Media

About a year ago today, Chris Anderson and Steve Rubel posted on the four percent (20) of Fortune 500 companies that were blogging.

Steve predicted “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.” Jupiter Research followed up in June, 2006, and predicted that nearly 70 percent of large company sites would implement corporate blogs by 2006.

I thought it might be interesting to do a “year-on-year” comparison of Fortune 500 bloggers. More important, I wanted to look at how the Fortune 500 are embracing the larger range of social media, including audiocasting, videocasting, wikis, forums, communities, etc. Lastly, I wanted to look at social media in specific industries.

Here are some highlights (I’ll follow-up with more later):

• Only about 10 percent (48) of the Fortune 500 are blogging which is more than double the number since Chris launched the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki. On a percentage basis, that’s a pretty large jump so I suppose Rubel can claim some victory. Jupiter, however, was on Jupiter with their prediction. In my view, the number of Fortune 500 bloggers will continue to grow at a steady pace, but I anticipate more rapid adoption of other forms of social media.

• In fact, our research shows that Fortune 500 companies are already adopting a wider range of social media more rapidly than blogging. Fifteen percent (75) have implemented one or more forms of social media as of today (12/29/06). Keep in mind that social media use is harder to track so I am sure our numbers are not 100 percent intellectually pure. As we used to say at Accenture, our findings are “directionally correct.”

• Fortune 500 technology companies continue to lead the charge in social media: 46 percent are blogging and 39 percent are audiocasting. Interestingly, almost 50 percent are videocasting! This jibes with the growth in video on the net, as well as a trend I’ve observed first-hand: it’s easier for some large enterprises to videocast versus blog.

• The energy industry is dead last in our research — we did not find any Fortune 500 energy companies blogging, audiocasting or podcasting.

I’ll post more on specific industries and “Social Media All Stars” in the coming days.

(Special thanks to Byron Crites, a PhD candidate at UT, for helping me out on this project.)

29 December 2006 | Blogging, Fortune 500, Podcasting, Trends, Videocasting | Comments