July 20, 2006

Study Finds the Obvious Is True

A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that bloggers tend to read online news accounts, join listservs, and scour other blogs at rates that far surpass their non-blogging counterparts, reports Online Media Daily.

"Bloggers are avid consumers of online media," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew and one of the report's authors. "They are consuming online media in a way that even other online users do not," she added. For instance, almost all bloggers - 95 percent - reported reading news online, compared to 73 percent of Internet users at large. The majority of bloggers - 55 percent - said they read e-mail newsletters or listservs, compared to 29 percent of all Web users; and 47 percent of bloggers reported reading other blogs for news, compared to 9 percent of all online users.

More interesting to me today is the study from Jupiter Research that finds that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate weblogs this year.

Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006. According to a new report, "Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement," currently 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate weblogs.

"Site operators should leverage existing Web content management best practices and functionality to decrease total cost of ownership, promote unified branding and increase site security," said Greg Dowling, Analyst at JupiterResearch and author of the report. "They can also realize considerable cost savings while mitigating deployment, management and maintenance concerns inherent in implementing additional stand-alone weblog authoring systems."

The new research finds that weblogs are underused for generating word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing opportunities. Only 32 percent of marketing executives said they use corporate weblogs to generate WoM around their company's products or services.

"By engaging prospective customers in active dialogue, companies can showcase their expertise and domain knowledge, creating a forum for communication of their strategies and visions," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. "In doing so, companies can generate buzz around their products or services, while eliciting feedback and collaboration from product evangelists."

Update: Now that I've read the Pew study itself - and not just the Online Media Daily story about the Pew study - I find it much more interesting. From the summary:

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression - documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism.

Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.That's still a lot of political blogs. Pew estimates that eight percent of American Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Eleven percent of 12 million bloggers is still 1.32 million people writing blogs whose main focus is politics.

Pew also reports that 39 percent of American Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs - and that figure is a significant increase since the fall of 2005.

MORE on the Pew blogger survey:
Mystery Pollster
Extreme Mortman
RexBlog

Real Journalist-Blogger Michael Silence jokes, "I'm sorry, but most bloggers I know just aren't morally superior enough or arrogant enough or liberal enough to be journalists. So, bloggers, go play with your little pixels while we big boys continue to run out of ink!"

Mike, we bloggers will never run out of pixels.