Five steps to turn buzz into sales
Which FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 blogs made the FT ComMetrics Blog Index
Financial Times – is blogging good value?
What is the FT ComMetrics Index?
ComMetrics has developed a detailed methodology to benchmark corporate blogs. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index uses the same methodology, but a less-detailed version.
Why create such an index?
We thought creating this index this would help promote good practice as far as corporate blogging is concerned.
If you want to find actionable insights, you need to segment your benchmarking data: pinpoint the various sources, user behavior and outcomes. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index helps corporate bloggers achieve this objective.
More issues below.
Who is included?
Companies included in the Index are taken from the FT Global 500 2008, ranked by market capitalisation. Where possible we have indexed the top 25 from the following categories: the US, Europe and the rest of the world. In some cases we were unable to find a corporate blog. In other instances, the blog may be owned by a subsidiary.
This is the case with Berkshire Hathaway: its subsidiary Business Wired has a successful blog that we included in the list. A similar case is EON: its UK division has a blog, but we found no active corporate blog published by its German headquarters (see also Social Media Marketing in Deutschland).
The FT ComMetrics Blog Index ranks FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 companies’ corporate blogs.
The 2009 FT ComMetrics Blog Index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular Digital Business supplement and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.
Please subscribe now so you can claim your corporate and/or personal blog AND trace those that you want to compare yourself to.
For Twitter, please use #hashtag ➡ #FTCBI
Where or how did we find these corporate blogs?
Our starting point was Debbie Weil’s The Big List of Big Brand Corporate Blogs, which lists over 80 different blogs from brands or corporations all over the world. She is probably the one who convinced us to build this index in the first place. Debbie has a great blog; anyone interested in social media should check it out.
Our next stop was the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. It has a few blogs that qualify using the criteria we developed for identifying corporate blogs. Really great job these people did in collecting all this important information, have a look.
Another big help was Peter Kim, who put together A List of Social Media Marketing Examples, (Bernhard Warner also recommended this list). Kim has an impressive list of a vast number of social media marketing examples. Sometimes it mentions brands (not necessarily the corporate owner of the brand) and other times, as in the case of IKEA, customer blogs are listed. This is no obstacle, however, and the list is just plain impressive. By the way, another blog that you have to read, his other stuff is impressive too.
The next step was a tweet to Twitter followers, which garnered a nice response from Michael E. Rubin. He suggested Alltop – all the corporate blogs and Feeds of the Blog Council. Of course, this should have been done earlier, since we ourselves are a member of the Alltop Social Media blog crowd.
We also found a ‘white paper’ (five pages but not much detail) and some presentation slides of a survey that included 132 Nordic companies, all with a market capitalization of more than 1 billion euro. There were a few only that had blogs, most we had included already. Check out Corporate blogging amongst listed Nordic companies, it is interesting reading.
Are we still looking for more blogs?
Yes, we are. Please tell us about yours. Companies often have several blogs listed in our database. For instance, all of Hewlett Packard’s numerous blogs are being tracked; naturally, the best one will be included in the Index.
If you want to check out who is already included, visit the
FT ComMetrics Blog Index
If you have a blog that we should track for the Index, tell us about it by leaving a comment below with the blog URL(s).
If you want to see how you compare to others, check out FTindex.ComMetrics.com (you must be registered to view data/statistics).
When will it be published?
The 2009 index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular supplement on Digital Business and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.
=========>
More resources:
FT/ComMetrics Blog Index
Pingback: Urs E. Gattiker
Pingback: Naijand Inc
Pingback: FT ComMetrics Blog Index: Who made the list?
Pingback: My.ComMetrics.com real-time trace update