Blogging is dead, long live blogging. An interesting statistic from the GWI Brand report reveals that 36% of internet users aged 16-64 said that they wrote on a personal blog within the last month. According to GWI that’s 545 million people across the 32 countries that GWI researched.
Most are blogging about popular culture with films (43%) the favourite topic, followed by music and science/technology (40% each). Other popular topics are ‘my personal life’, travel/places, food/restaurants/cooking, work life/job, online services/applications, environmental issues and personal health care.
Not surprisingly product and brand reviews aren’t in the top 10, although they are popular with 15% of bloggers.
For public relations and corporate communications the two most interesting findings are firstly the continuing importance of blogs and secondly that blogging about work life and jobs is in the top 10.
This presents an opportunity for corporate social media policies and guidelines to enable far more employees to blog about topics that they are interested in and that will be of interest to customers and other stakeholders. Rather than relying on the PR and communications team to produce content you can enable real experts to write it.
Hi Stuart,
Thank you for your article, and I agree with you that there are opportunities out there for marketers to tap in and that there is a gap in the market. Bloggers are top influencers in todays consumer society, people are much more likely to trust recommendations from a real person, than from a targeted promotion email. Bloggers are everywhere, FB users, Twitter, Google +…. It is important that bloggers have a way to organise the industry information so that they can share their ideas with their followers. I wonder how many tools are out there to help bloggers achieve this?
Me too a blogger and i am a techie blogger 🙂