Global Blogging Study : Bloggers are influential and action oriented
PR Company Edelman has released a white paper studying blogging around the world. [ PDF Version ]One trend they noted was that more "influencers" are blog readers than "non-influencers".
What's an "influencer"?
"Influencers" are people who actively try to effect public discourse by contacting politicians or media outlets or participating in political rally or similar activity. (p. 5, A Corporate Guide to Global Blogging)
Some Noteworthy Points
Blogging has gone mainstream in Japan with 74% of the population reading blogs.
Japan and Poland are the two countries where more women than men read blogs.
Two of ten bloggers take action offline based on based on reading a blog. Belgians are the most likely to take action with 43% indicating that they do so but only 14% of Belgians read blogs. (p. 8, 18) Japanese are the least likely to take action with just 18% of respondents saying they would do so. (p. 14)
27% (76,000,000) of Americans read blogs. 34% of them (26,000,000) are "influencers". (p. 31)
Reading blogs is very popular in China like other Asian countries. "Four in 10 Chinese claim to read blogs once a week, a higher frequency than was recorded for every Western nation." (p. 10)
Blogging occupies a special niche in the local information environment in China due to the bureaucratic processes of media publishing. Many journalists have successful blogs where they can post more freely and widely. (p. 10)
The Chinese internet culture also heavily relies on bulletin board systems. A convention, "zhuanzai", has evolved where it considered perfectly fine to repost any copyrighted articles or blog posts without prior permission on bulletin boards which usually have a large number of readers. (p. 11-12)
The amount that mainstream press cites blogs varies from country to country.
An audit of top tier mainstream press in the UK, shows that articles referencing blogs has risen dramatically: from 4 citations in the first quarter of 2004 to 246 references in the third quarter of 2006. (p. 258)
Only 8% of Fortune 500 businesses have a corporate blog and most are still organized around command and control approach to communications. (p. 31)
Steve Rubel, Senior VP of Edelman's me2revolution practice and well known author of a blog on citizen journalism - Micro Persuasion, notes that:
The rules of engagement with the blogosphere are quite different. The common law dictates that companies participate in open, continuous, authentic conversation, which is quite different from "messaging" and communicating at audiences.(p. 33)
Steve points out these universal truths: (p. 34, 35)
- Blogging is a world wide phenomena
- Blogs are increasingly influencing mainstream media
- Topics covered in blogs varies with the locale
- The October 2006 "State of the Blogosphere" published by Technorati shows that blogging may be leveling off. Gartner Group predicts it will peak at 100 million blogs
- Blogs are not dying but people are moving towards creating and publishing on other social media sites that may or may not incorporate blogs such as YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, etc.
Canada was not one of the countries studied in this report so we'll have to wonder if our blogging country profile is more like our neighbors to the south or the British.
Related Posts:
Why Do More Canadians Read Blogs than the French, British and Americans?
Tags: Blogs | Corporate Blogging |Enterprise Blogging | Social Software
