Corporate blogging takes a nosedive

Despite a burst of enthusiasm for corporate business-to-business blogs last year, a new report indicates that firms are already growing disenchanted with them.

Forrester Research's 'How To Derive Value From B2B Blogging' reveals that the number of B2B firms to begin blogging in 2007 was significantly down on the previous year.

We've dedicated a lot of column inches to blogging over the last six months, from doing the planning legwork through to getting value from the project.

As we emphasised in those articles, a major prerequisite to a corporate blog is having someone on the payroll that can both write well, and write frequently. The study demonstrates that in many cases, firms are lacking at least one of the above.

Over 70% of blogs examined by Forrester stuck strictly to business/technical topics and offered little or no personal insight, with 56% of them merely regurgitating company news.

To paraphrase Paul Gillin's thoughts on the matter: the topics are boring, the voice is uninspiring and institutional and the authors don't invite conversation. And with many blogs receiving little dialogue from the customer community, many firms will be questioning whether the returns warrant the effort in the first place.