Shel Holtz:
According to the results of a study released at the BlogOn conference in New York, 55% of corporations are blogging internally, externally, or both. Guidewire Group's BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey suggests 91.4% of these corporations are using blogs internally and 96.6% externally. If you believe these results, I have the deed to a nice bridge we should talk about.Exactly - 140 respondents to a survey that seems inevitably biased towards selecting people with an interest in blogging, and from the responses of a skewed sample set of 140 we get to "91% of companies are using blogs internally". Amazing, and I don't understand why the general reaction hasn't been more disdainful - I wonder what the reaction would have been if, with the same sample size, the headline was "2% of companies are using blogs" ?
Hi,
In talking to most folks at BlogOn and from the traditional press, they've appreciated our survey because at the moment, there really is virtually no other information about corporate blogging out there. And while the sample is small and admittedly skewed towards folks interested in blogging (by definition), we've been explict our goals (take a first cut at exploring why corporations are adopting) and our methodology. It's not complete information, but it's transparent and useful to a lot of people that don't get blogging yet.
We're planning to field additional studies, so we'd be delighted to get your questions and suggestions for future research.
Mike Sigal
Co-Founder and CEO, Guidewire Group
Thanks for the comment Mike.
I'm not sure I agree that this is useful information - I think you'd have got more valid results if you'd just stopped 140 people in the street, instead of this small and very skewed sample.
Your state that your explicit goal is to "take a first cut at exploring why corporations are adopting, and yet your first two key findings are: "corporations...are adopting blogging technologies and practices. that 89% of respondents are blogging or planning to blog", and, "corporate adoption of blogging is entering its hyper-growth phase. More than 50% of respondents have launched [a] blog in the last year."
I disagree 100% (using a biased sample of 1!) that you can get to those results from your inputs, and I think it's even a little dangerous to be throwing out such numbers, especially when we all know that the press often don't drill down into the methodologies, but instead focus on the headline stats.
Have to agree with you, Anu. I think it's great that Mike's trying to get some useful information quantifying things, I really do, but the numbers don't really cut it for me. Just too prone to bias.
Love the point about the audience's lack of disdain. Get the feeling that it's not just the numbers that are skewed.