Onalytica has published an interesting white paper on blogging and its potential effect on corporate reputation, by analysing the influence of Dell Hell on Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine blog.
Instinctively I expected the result would be to show that blogging has not yet come of age, so I was quite surprised to see that Buzzmachine was the 11th most powerful online influencer on Dell's customer services by dint of its being the primary source of information for other bloggers. I didn't expect a single blog to score so highly.
The really interesting point though is that when taken together, blogs are the second most influential player ranking close to three times more significant than Yahoo! in third spot. Given the propensity of bloggers to link to one another and the speed at which some authors are building up reputations (and presumably the number of people who read them via RSS feed) this is surely a shot across corporate bows - I can't imagine that blogs are going to become less influential over the next few years...
Posted by dompannell at December 6, 2005 5:47 PM | TrackBack