Hi there, yes, I have been remiss this week. I really am committed to posting every day (that’s the way it used to be on my personal blog, anyway – before I started this one!) I feel badly – I have been so busy meeting with many of you this week and talking to you about what social media (particularly blogs) can do for your business that I simply have had no time to construct a post worthy of your attention (because that’s the other part – with a personal blog, one can simply cut and paste the latest meme and leave it at that. With this blog, I want to provide you with valuable analysis and information about the world of social media. And the thinking stuff takes time!)

So, I’m going to give you a listing of some of the most interesting stories about corporate blogging from the last couple of days for you to peruse at your leisure… Enjoy!

Blogging The Hand that Feeds You
When I first started blogging, there were warnings at every turn about not blogging about your work or your boss or your co-workers, and then a million links to bloggers who had been fired for having done so (Dooce being perhaps the most famous). My, how the times have changed! This story from the NY Times

Build Brand With Targetting Blogging
This title sounds promising, no? And yet the article is strangely devoid of any sort of useful information. It actually includes the following paragraph:

“Knowing your audience is vastly important. Use your site stats to figure out if males, females, college students or minors are visiting the site more frequently and target landing pages from the blog by those numbers.”

Um, if I could figure out what gender and age people were based on site metrics? I would be a bazillionaire. This link was in one of my many Google news alerts, and I would love to know how they got there – for they truly suck. (Aw, now I’m just being mean)

Small Firms Ignoring the Benefits of Blogging
This one is slightly more interesting, but also slightly suspect as it is based on a “white paper” released by a hosting provider. Basically, they surveyed 2,000 SMBs, and while 50% said they would use a blog to “drive traffic” to their websites, only 3% had concrete plans to do so. No word on why the discrepancy, which to me is the big important question (lack of knowledge, uncertaintly about ROI or implementation? I’d really like to know!). The research also showed that 26% of blog readers said they wanted blogs to be updated daily, while 30% said they didn’t care what the schedule was, so long as the blog was interesting. While I certainly don’t think a blog needs to be updated every, single day, there must be some sort of regular schedule. Otherwise people do get tired of coming back to find nothing’s changed and they tend to wander away (just watch your numbers drop when you ignore your own blog for a few days to see what I mean).

And, if you’ve read this far – you get a real treat. This little gem from Comscore Networks and it’s called Behaviors of the Blogosphere: Understanding the Scale, Composition and Activities of Weblog Audiences. And it’s a must-read for anyone considering using a blog as part of their marketing/communications plans – especially helpful in building your business case. Here’s a top-level summary:

• 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
• political blogs were the most popular, followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
• Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

You can read the whole thing online – enjoy!