PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

Mike Sigal, co-Founder and CEO of the Guidewire Group, has posted the following comment in response to my criticism and questions about the Group’s recent survey:

Hi Constantin,

Thanks for the critiques. Our goal as a research firm is to provide information that will explain emerging technology markets, so your feedback will help us develop more robust products in the future. I’m going to post a couple of general comments in response to your post and others as an update to the original post, but I wanted to answer your questions directly:

1) The primary goal of the survey was to explore why and how corporations were adopting blogs. That’s why we promoted the survey via press release and to the blogosphere…because we wanted folks who were blogging to answer it. The fact that such a large percentage of the sample were either already blogging or had plans to blog (and frankly the fact that a huge percentage of the adopters started in 2005) is what lead us to conclude that corporate blogging has already turned the corner into hypergrowth.

2) No guarantee. That’s why we were explicit about the sample and methodology. What surprised us was the distribution of titles/roles that responded to the survey.

3) It’s relevant to the corporate world because there are actual examples of ‘real’ companies that are using blogs and other social media tools for significant business benefit. There were terrific examples at BlogOn. Given that most coverage of blogging outside the blogosphere has been extremely light on corporate case studies, benefits, etc., we wanted those folks trying to learn something about social media to know that SOMEONE is looking into it. Hopefully it will cause MORE people to look into it.

4) The reaction at BlogOn to our annoucement (we only showed the adoption curve…the Executive Summary was put on everyone’s seats so they could read it) seemed pretty positive. In my at-the-show conversations with attendees and speakers, they we’re all pretty enthusiastic that we were drawing attention (both via the show and the survey) to corporate adoption and benefits, rather than the same old debates about journalists vs. bloggers, media transformation, etc. We’ll be posting the podcasts and webcasts from the show in the near future, so between that and the folks you mentioned getting back to their offices and deciding they want to post about the survey…I’m sure you’ll be able to come to your own conclusions.

Again, thanks for the feedback. And if you have suggestions about what we should investigate and/or how to improve our methodology…we welcome them!

Mike Sigal
Co-Founder and CEO, Guidewire Group

Try to say this with a straight face:

The vast majority of companies (89%) are either blogging now or planning to blog soon.

Are you LOL? ROTFL?

Anyway, the staggering, unbelievable, hard to believe “statistic” is one of the results of a Guidewire Group “survey” called Blogging in the Enterprise, sponsored by iUpload.

To its credit, the Guidewire Group is transparent about the survey’s methodology (links added):

The “Blogging in the Enterprise” survey was fielded for two weeks in September 2005. The online survey was open to public participation, encouraged by direct email to a random sample of 5000 CMO Magazine readers, a press release announcing the survey, and unsolicited postings in various blogs and blog search engines. 140 individuals responded to the survey.

(Source: PR Newswire press release)

(Missing: the fact that those completing the survey were eligible to enter a draw to win an iPod Nano or a complimentary registration to BlogOn 2005.)

A couple of questions about the survey:

1. Why would anyone use a “random sample of 5000 CMO Magazine readers“, then give up any control of the survey instrument’s distribution by making public the link to the questionnaire, and by asking bloggers to post about it? The result is that the survey has used a nonprobabilistic sample, and that no generalizations can be made about the data outside the small number of survey respondents.
2. What’s the guarantee that those who took the survey were in the position of knowing the information they provided?
3. If Guidewire was aware of the survey’s limitations –as the press release shows– why is ignoring them by talking about the results as if they were relevant for the corporate world? E.g.: Staggering Stats on Blog Adoption (Demo Letter), BlogOn 2005 Opening Remarks (BlogOn 2005 Blog).
4. Finally, I wonder what was the reaction of participants to BlogOn 2005 when these staggering “statsâ€? were announced. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything about it in the entries tagged with BlogOn and BlogOn2005 on Technorati; and there’s no reaction so far from the fellow PR bloggers who participated (most of them as speakers) to the event: Elizabeth Albrycht, Shel Israel, Mike Manuel, Laurie Mayers, Jeremy Pepper, and Lisa Poulson. Steve Rubel has a link (Survey: Corporate Blogging Takes Off) –but no comment– to an article from internetnews.com.

Side note: there’s no difference, essentially, between Guidewire’s survey and the Edelman/Technorati recent survey. In fact, Guidewire was more upfront about the study’s limitations then Edelman (we’re still waiting for Edelman’s official report about the methodology, two weeks after the results were released). But the effects of self-selection are more visible in Guidewire’s survey.

Resources

• PR Newswire: iUpload and Guidewire Group Announce Survey on Corporate Blogging, Sept. 21, 2005
• PR Newswire: Enterprise Blogging Survey Finds Corporate Adoption of Blog Tools Is Key Driver of Social Media Market, Oct. 17, 2005
• BlogOn 2005 Blog: Guidewire’s Executive Research Summary on Corporate Blogging Adoption, Oct. 19, 2005 (PDF file, 8 pages; see page 7 for methodology)
• iUpload: Download the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey (free registration required) - includes the executive summary and Blogging in the Enterprise: Myths and Realities (PDF, 22 pages)

Reactions from the blogosphere

• Mike Gotta: “The survey has some potential and initial statistics are interesting but the survey unfortunately does not have enough data points to warrant serious attention. [...] My first concern is the sample size. 140 respondents is small. The respondent group was also self-selecting which can skew results (even though the survey was publicized, it is not the most balanced way of gathering statistically relevant data). Only 19% of the people who responded were from companies with greater than 1000 employees (that’s about 26 people). Around 32 people responded from companies with revenue of over $100 million. It’s unfortunate since the media has picked these statistics up as trends across “corporate america” and clearly that inference is a leap of faith unless you want to extrapolate that based on 26-32 people. You can of course. I would prefer to still classify corporate blogging as embryonic and in an exploratory/pilot phase within the vast majority of companies.”
• Shel Holtz: “Guidewire Group’s BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey suggests 91.4% of these corporations are using blogs internally and 96.6% externally. If you believe these results, I have the deed to a nice bridge we should talk about.”
• Anu Gupta: “I don’t understand why the general reaction [to the survey] hasn’t been more disdainful - I wonder what the reaction would have been if, with the same sample size, the headline was ‘2% of companies are using blogs’?”

(More to come.)

Media coverage

• Enid Burns, ClickZ Stats: Corporate Blog Adoption, Stronger in Small Business. After a long listing of the results, the last line of the article includes a reference to the number of respondents (”the survey was completed by 140 respondents”) - but there’s no question whatsoever about the relevance of survey’s results.
• Susan Kuchinskas, internetnews.com: Corporate Blogging Takes Off . Same thing: lots of “stats”, no questioning of their validity.

Ketchum, in partnership with PR blogger Klaus Eck (econcon), has published a Top 100 German Business Blogs, based on data from Blogstats.de (which is a German Technorati, if I understand correctly).

Memo to Ketchum bloggers: this is something interesting you could write about. Anything that could bridge the information gap between the English-speaking business blogosphere and the German-speaking business blogosphere is valuable.

Resources:

• Top 100 German Business Blogs (in German): http://www.top100-business-blogs.de
• Klaus Eck, PR Blogger: Top 100 Business Blog-Liste (Google translation)
• Ketchum press release: Ketchum Top 100 Business Blog List (in German)

Greg Yardley:

As individual publishing for friends and family grows, how will the standard public relations folks, etc. react? Imagine a scenario where negative publicity spreads through friends and family networks behind a firewall, souring an entire community on a product, but the post never appears in a publicly-accessible place.

MWW’s new media strategies practice (aka Blog 360°) has a new name, DialogueMedia (long live the CamelCase!), a new director, and a corporate blog, called Open The Dialogue. The announcement was blogged by the firm’s CEO, Michael Kempner.

(Just a list of conversations I’m following.)

The survey:

• Questionnaire - posted at http://www.bloggerstudy.com/blogstudy_q.asp (now gone) for a week, starting September 23, 2005 | BlogPulse Conversation Tracker | Technorati Cosmos
• Findings: https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy (October 7, 2005) | Google BlogSearch Cosmos
• Responses to the open-ended questions: https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy/FreeForm.aspx
• Final report: (PDF) Public RelationSHIPS: Communications in the Age of Personal Media (published January 10, 2006) | Technorati Cosmos

Blog entries:

• Richard Edelman: The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends, Sept. 12
• Richard Edelman: Blog Study is Now Live, Sept. 23
• Niall Kennedy, Technorati/Edelman Blogger PR Survey, Sept. 23
• Niall Kennedy: Blogging and PR survey, Sept. 25
• Matthew Hurst: Technorati/Edelman Survey, Sept. 25
• Phil Gomes, My Thoughts: The Edelman / Technorati Survey, Sept. 26
• Richard Edelman: The Farmer and the Cowman Continued - Findings from the Edelman/Technorati Study, Oct. 5
• Kevin Dugan: Edelman/Technorati Blog Study Results, Oct. 5
• Robert French: Edelman/Technorati Blog Study :: Results Are Out, Oct. 5
• My post: Waiting for Edelman (blog survey report), Oct. 6
• Matthew Hurst: Technorati/Edelman Survey, Oct. 6
• Phil Gomes, My Take On The Survey Results, Oct. 6
• Richard Edelman: Update to Edelman/Technorati Survey, Oct. 7
• Phil Gomes: More Survey Fun, Oct. 7
• Robert French: Edelman/Technorati Survey :: Good First Step, Oct. 7
• Niall Kennedy: Technorati/Edelman Blogger PR Survey Results, Oct. 10
• Edelman: “Corporate Communications in the Age of Citizen Journalism” Panel Discussion (Oct. 6) — presentation of survey results: webcast and transcript, Oct. 11
• Robert French: Edelman/Technorati Blogger Study Update, Oct. 12
• Robert French: PR Blog Surveys Abound — As of yet, only one makes the grade, Oct. 30
• My post: What’s missing from the Edelman/Technorati blogger study, January 12, 2006

In the media:

• Keith O’Brien, PR Week: Edelman blog survey finds pitching opportunities for PR pros. Oct. 12

Summary: Why the articles published by The Guardian and The Times on the Blog Relations PR Survey are inaccurate (IMO); what are the journalistic standards for reporting a survey; a response to the comments of Hugh Fraser, founder of Blog Relation; why is important to discuss the limitations of blog surveys and how they are reported.

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