No surprise: corporate bloggers are the smallest piece of the blogging pie, according to Technorati’s just released State of the Blogosphere 2008. Only 12 percent of bloggers self-identify as “corporate,” meaning they blog in an official capacity for their company.
But to complicate the numbers, a number of corporate bloggers also identify themselves as personal or professional. See chart below.
Frustratingly, this leads to more fuzzy math. Twelve percent of what, I asked Technorati’s gurus yesterday. Senior Director of Marketing Jennifer McLean replied via email that the 12% refers to the number of bloggers surveyed. That would be 1,290 completed surveys from bloggers in 66 countries, according to Technorati’s explanation of the methodology for this year’s report.
“But there again you may have multiple writers contributing, etc so I don’t know that you could discern the number of corporate blogs from there,” she wrote.
For the record, 12% of 1,290 is 154.8. So 155 corporate blogs… or corporate bloggers out of the total surveyed.
Another way to look at it (which also depends on self identifying) is by the number of blogs on Technorati tagged “corporate.” There are 5,287 of those, Jennifer told me in her email. Oops… I’ve tagged my blog “corporate” to refer to the subject matter. And mine is a blog about corporate blogging.
We’re not back to square one in terms of coming up with the number of corporate blogs or corporate bloggers. One tenth of the active blogging pie seems about right.
Seems we can safely say that this phenomenon is still in its infancy – and will continue to grow. Here’s my (updated) list of about 75 Big Brand blogs.
Anyone want to take a different approach to the math?