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July 14, 2008

Forrester Research has just released a new report that raises a daunting question: How many B2B companies are benefiting from all various forms of blogging? According to Forrester, about 52.9 percent of companies involved in the B2B segment say that blogging has only a marginal significance or that it is totally irrelevant to their overall marketing efforts.

Among some companies tracked regularly by Forrester, the number of new blogs fell from 36 two years ago to just 3 this year, representing a significant drop by any measure.

Forrester implies the problem may lie with B2B companies themselves, using words like “dull” and “drab” to describe some of the B2B blogs. Among the knocks against blogs noted by Forrester: not enough personality in most of the posts, an irregular posting schedule and bloggers who simply just don’t stick with it.

Overall, 55.8 percent of such B2B blogs feature mostly press releases or other well-known news, giving people little incentive to read them in the first place.

Some marketing observers say that if it’s a B2B blog, shouldn’t it be about business? There’s certainly nothing wrong with inserting an occasional personal anecdote to help illustrate a point or otherwise liven up a business topic, but most people don’t want to read about the hobbies, pets or personal lives of vendors or business partners.

Some have seen business-oriented blogs that read like a particularly painful holiday newsletter, with the added subtext of trying to sell some product or service.

Forrester also presents the lack of comments on most B2B blogs. About 58 percent receive no more than a single comment per post, a sign that the intended audience isn’t being engaged.

There are some that wonder why Forrester mentions "sticking to business" and/or technical topics (something that 70 percent of B2B blogs do) as a negative.

There are some that disagree on that.

Just because people don’t leave comments doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. They may see little reason to reiterate points already made in a post, and it often just takes too much time to leave more involved comments.

Some may go back later and respond to a thought-provoking post, but it appears that most never do.

Additional reading:
Business blogs to help a website's rankings in the search engines.

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Source: Signal vs Noise.