43% More Companies to Rely More Heavily on Blogs for Marketing Purposes by 2010

“Consumer use of social media has moved more toward social networking and microblogging, which seem to have eroded the perceived usefulness of full-fledged blogs.
But in the corporate world, a different picture emerges.”

That’s the news coming out of a report released by research company eMarketer. This year, eMarketer estimates, about 34% of companies will use blogs as marketing tools, up from 16% in 2007.  “Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service,” Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, said in a statement.

EMarketer is also reporting that smaller companies tend to embrace blogs at higher rates than larger companies. “This might be because larger, public companies—particularly in industries such as pharma and financial services—have more legal, logistical and regulatory constraints than smaller firms,” Verna said.

RMC’s take: While the above appears to be good news for non-pharma/non-financial services sector blogs, as a whole the importance, value and usefulness of blogging for marketing purposes **has absolutely** been impacted by the popularity of social networking and microblogging by businesses as well. The “erosion of perceived usefulness of full-fledged blogs” cited above is surely not limited to consumer blogging alone.

Personally, I know plenty of companies (of varying sizes) that either do not embrace blogging or prefer microblogging or status updates to blogging. It’s just far easier for folks to compose a quick “microblog” post of 140-characters or a simple status update vs. a full-fledged blog post packed with original content on a regular basis.

Emarketer findings state that “…in many studies, company use of social networks and Twitter does outpace the use of blogs, but for companies the platforms are not mutually exclusive. Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not.”

While I agree with the notion that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not, the bottom line is that many businesses are indeed using their social media outposts as their “blogs.” I see this very consistently with, for example, the music and entertainment industry. Take Poison front man Bret Michaels, for example. Just about every link on his Twitter feed takes you to a specific post on his Facebook page. This is a definite trend I’ve been seeing for a while in other industries as well.

Blog purists will argue that the Twitter link should drive the traffic to a post on one’s blog vs. their Facebook page. And in an ideal world, they’d be right. In the real world, however, time and resources are invaluable commodities which are often — for most businesses — in short supply.

I think it would be interesting to see EMarketer’s report findings and percentage numbers next to numbers of companies who are actively opting for the “social media short cut” and prefer to bypass the blogging route altogether.

Thoughts are welcome…