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For the first time in my role as Biz-Dev for Blogware, these numbers truly surprised me even with the phenomenal growth in the market that we've all been watching for some time now. The Key findings from their executive summary say it all…

…89% of respondents are either blogging now or are planning to blog.

This was the sticker shocker for me, I assumed maybe 40% which would've been a significant success in my books compared to personal blogging that has fewer risks associated and therefore should have a much higher growth rate. When looking at the methodology for the survey it was open to the public and required opt-in with only 140 respondents, but it was pretty respectable in it's coverage of individual roles within organizations, business types, and the way it was marketed.

…More than 50% of respondents have launched one or more blogs in the last year. Less than 10% have been using blogs for more than 3 years.

This one wasn't so surprising. You would more than likely find similar ratios if surveying individual blog publishers. When I first took on this role about a year and a half ago, there were a little over 2 million blogs being tracked by technorati where today they're tracking over 20 million.

Adoption is being driven by specific business benefits from both internal (improved internal communications - 77.4%) and external (improved brand recognition - 78%) facing deployments.

Although as I discussed in my last article, the easiest way around an objection regarding risk is to get a company started with intranet blogging, external blogging has it's own risks and rewards that are definitely worth the effort to small businesses and even the largest ones. You can go ahead and ask Microsoft who is one of the biggest. Sun is also widely known to have thousands of public employee blogs.

They then lead into a lot of valuable information about utilization by number of employees and revenue showing that smaller business are willing to dive in sooner and take risks which makes sense. The real value for me came when looking at the data demonstrating how blogs are being used in both internal as well as external capacities and how.

The big winner for internal applications is communication. The uses listed by the respondents with percentages are:

-    Knowledge-sharing (63%)

-    Internal Communications (44%)

-    Project Management (30%)

-    Personal Knowledge Management (23%)

-    Event Logging (23%)

-    Team Management (20%)

The key benefits they enjoyed were cited as:

Improved Internal Communications (77%)

Replacement of Other Work Processes (41%)

Replacement of Email (39%)

External Blogging is a little clearer, where the primary benefits involve marketing and PR. The primary uses listed are:

-    PR/Marketing (61%)

-    Demonstration of Thought Leadership (61%)

The major benefits listed for these uses were:

Brand Recognition (78%)

External Communication (78%)

Vehicle for Customer Feedback (66%)

Improved Search Engine Ranking / Traffic (58%)

Generating Income (20%)

Well there you have it, this level of detail is difficult to refute and definitely invaluable when designing your marketing campaigns in this space.