Tuesday, November 08, 2005

CEOs give blogs a thumb (up or down, depending on your outlook on life)

PR Week/Burson Marsteller released their annual CEO survey, including some insights on attitude to blogging. Key takeouts:

- 7% of CEOs are blogging.
- 18% of CEOs plan to host a company blog over the next 2 years.
- 59 % of CEOs think blogs are useful for internal communication.
- 47% think blogs are useful to reach an external audience.

Recognised benefits of blogs included to quickly communicate new ideas and news, providing an informal venue for communication and obtaining immediate feedback. See press release. No online version of the survey available yet.

First seen at micropersuasion

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Joel,

The report is available here http://www.prweek.com/us/home/article/526468/2005-ceo-survey-reveals-stakeholder-comms-up-blog-use-low/

Click on the 200 CEO Survey results link.

Joël Céré said...

Thank you!

Steven Silvers said...

The survey notes how 7% of CEOs are in fact “blogging themselves.”

Wait a sec. First of all, the survey of 131 CEOs was done by PRWeek (a trade magazine that sells subscriptions and advertising to the flackery industry) and Burson-Marsteller (a large international agency that sells bloggery along with its flackery).

If this survey really represents all CEOs, then we should see 445 blogs authored by the chief executives among the 6,357 U.S. companies listed on either NASDAQ or NYSE, plus the 257 private companies with a billion dollars of more of revenue. There aren’t.

Add to this that the “confidence level” of the survey is only 90 percent. So either there are a whole lot of CEOs writing – and we should visit their blogs lest they get discouraged about lack of linkages – or there’s less than zero.

It seems ironic that the same people who tout the power of blogs to bring truth to light will repeat stuff like this without a single grain of salt because it supports whatever dog they have in the hunt.