Study: Corporate blogs boost traffic, attention

A new study by Porter Novelli shows that corporations have been feeling the need to jump into the blogoshpere recently and for those who are doing so, are seeing positive results. According to the study, 76% of the respondents indicated they have seen an increase in media attention and/or Web site traffic as a result of their blogs. Also, 42% indicated there has been at least one specific post that has affected the company or brand and in the vast majority of cases it has had a positive affect.

So what does this mean? For one, technology is still newsworthy. I think it's interesting that media attention was included with the boost in website traffic. The fact of the matter is that this is still new enough, particularly from the corporate world's adoption of new technology, that it's a story in itself.

I was talking to a friend at a PR firm here in Nashville this week and mentioned the same thing to him. I suggested one of their new clients incorporate a new technology into their plan and that the very use of it would be a newsworthy item in addition to the benefits the actual technolgy brings. He and the client caught the vision and look to implement this soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out...but I think it will be great.

A few years from now we won't care that Dell managers just started blogging in the last few weeks or that the guys at Microsoft have seen huge benefits from blogging (see Robert Scoble's book, Naked Conversations) but for now, blogging is beneficial both for your website traffic and the media attention you can generate by its usage.