Edelman releases two new studies along with highlights of a third - download them here

Edelman recently released two new studies:

1. 3rd Annual New Frontiers in Employee Communcations (download the PDF here)

and

2. A Corporate Guide to the Blogosphere (links to Edelman Europe CEO David Bain's blog entry; download the PDF here)

They also 3. announced preliminary results of the 2007 Edelman Trust Barometer (download PDF of 2006 Trust Barometer here)

Great stats and anecdotes to chew over, including this blockbuster:

"Nearly one-third of companies are blogging [note: is this internal or external blogging?]; one-third are podcasting."

Also, "Business is more trusted than media and government in every region of the globe."

I haven't had a chance to read any of these thoroughly but want to get the links up. Sounds like the corporate blogging stat is based on a fairly small sample size (senior corporate comms execs at 75 Fortune 500 companies).

Comments

[David Brain]

Looking forward to your thoughts on it especially the trust scores on ceos and the role of "poeple like me" and of course the still low scores for bloggers.

[Jeffrey Treem]

Debbie,

Thanks for linking to our New Frontiers study. I wanted to quickly address a couple things you bring up.

First, the one-third stat for companies blogging is internal AND external. The study then breaks it down and we found that of those companies with blogs, nearly a third of those are internal only.

Yes, our sample is small (75 Fortune 500 companies + a couple dozen large global companies). However, we think that given we found more than 30 companies blogging in our relatively small sample blogging and data from other studies claims less than 10 percent of all Fortune 500 companies are blogging, these findings are somewhat significant.

As we concede in the report, this study is not without its fair share of validity issues, but our hope is to provide insight into what leading organizations are doing and spark a much needed conversation among corporate communicators about the role of new media in employee communications.

I hope you get the time to read through the complete report. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.