Tuesday, March 20, 2007

A Fortune 500 Blogosphere? Not Yet

Enterprise 2.0 is slowly gaining grounds and you cannot deny it despite top management's neutral position on yet another major "Reengineering of the Corporation". Supply chain management was perhaps among the first departments to really utilize the power of real-time information, and interoperable data standarts -- a mashup-ed ecosystem -- but improving your employees productivity through Web 2.0 tools such as intranet blogs and wikis remains just as unpopular as actual Fortune 500 companies blogging? But how come? Lack of evangelists? Not at all. There's one minor obstacle, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, unless of course you dedicate extra investments into training him, which is exactly what I feel is happening at the corporate stage - everyone's patiently waiting for the concepts to mature before training and implementation happen for real. What's the current attitude towards external Web 2.0 activities? A Fortune 500 blogosphere isn't emerging as fast as the mainstream one is according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki :

"a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products. According to our research, 40 (8%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 10/05/06. The navigation sidebar to the right lists all the Fortune 500 companies. The list below are the ones that we've found so far that have public blogs as defined above. Please help us by entering data on those we've missed. ONLY Fortune 500 companies, please. If you're not sure if it's on the F500 list (it includes US companies only), check the sidebar. If it's not there, consider adding it to the Global 1,000 Business Blogging page instead."

I think the main reason behind this are the inevitable channel conflicts that will arise from let's say Pfizer's blogging compared to using the services of their traditional advertising and PR agencies -- I also imagine a links density analysis of their blog indicating the highest % of links pointing to Erowid.org. But ask yourself the following, what if these very same agencies start offering bloggers-for-hire in their portfolio of services, would the big guys get interested then? Or when will they start understanding the ROI of blogging?

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