Less than 5% of large and mid-sized companies worldwide currently has a corporate blog, according to LEWIS PR. While corporate blogging is gaining ground in the USA, the overwhelming majority of businesses around the world go without any form of company-branded blogs.

The findings, announced at the EuroBlog 2007 conference in Ghent, Belgium, were based on a survey of 300 companies from 10 different countries. Of the European companies included in the survey, only 2.5% had one or more corporate blogs.
Asia-Pacific scored slightly higher with 5.5%, with the US leading at 14.0%.

However, the majority of the companies who took part operate in tech-savvy markets such as IT and media. Therefore, LEWIS believes that actual blog use by corporations is even lower than the survey found.

When interpreting results, LEWIS drew a remarkable conclusion. “Interestingly enough, with the exception of the USA every country seems to think it’s lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to corporate blogging,” said Ilona Hitel, VP, global sales and marketing at LEWIS.

“Their reasons vary strongly: Southern European countries such as Italy and Spain think it’s because they’re traditionally slower with IT-related innovation, while other countries like Germany and the Netherlands blame it on a lack of understanding of the (financial) benefits of having a corporate blog. Key barriers in the Asia-Pacific region include a tradition of doing business face-to-face and a high level of media regulation. However, the reality is that nobody is lagging – corporate blogging simply hasn’t arrived yet,” added Hitel.

LEWIS conducted the survey as part of its paper ‘The business value of blogging WhitePaper’. In addition to the survey results, the paper includes a comprehensive set of tools and insights that help a company decide whether or not to launch a corporate blog.

“Companies around the world remain hesitant to start blogging because the benefits, costs and implications are not clear to them”, said Mark van der Wolf, Head of Creative at LEWIS Benelux and lead author of the paper. “Their caution is justified, because as the paper shows, a corporate blog is definitely not for everyone.”

“Still, under the right circumstances and with the right approach, it can contribute greatly to achieving a multitude of business objectives.”

The complete paper is available for download freely at http://www.lewis360.com.