Quick Update: Coca-cola whom I included in the corporate blog rankings a few months ago, just announced an ambitious program to send three corporate bloggers into space. Nah! Just kidding. They’ll be sending 3 bloggers across all the 206 countries they’re sold in, to chronicle happiness.
Quite an ambitious and buzz friendly theme. Read all about it here and check out their current blog here. Now back to the Top 10 corporate blogs on the planet…
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Did you know: Nearly 13% of bloggers interviewed for the State of the 2009 blogosphere (conducted by Technorati) either blog for themselves, their own company (I’d consider small businesses part of this category) or for a larger organization?! Not too shabby for a space that was in its infancy when I started blogging three years ago?
State of the Corporate Blogosphere
The above slide from Richard Jalichandra’s presentation at Blog World gave me another reason to dust off the Corporate blog rankings that I’ve assiduously crafted over the past few years (July 2006, May 2008, and CEO blogs in 06). I’ve decided to publish these rankings annually to coincide with Technorati’s State of the blogosphere announcements.
So, what are the brands that have continued to effectively communicate to their users through social media such as a corporate blog? The permanence of many of the 15 companies listed was altered by two fast rising brands, Twitter and Mint, both of whom have been in the news this past year. [Disclosure: I maintain and run a corporate blog for LinkedIn that can be found in the rankings below].
Top 10 Corporate Blogs in 2009 (per Technorati Authority)
1. Google [Authority: 826]
2. Twitter [Authority: 733]
3. Facebook [Authority: 657]
4. Yahoo! [Authority: 656]
5. Dell [Authority: 641]
6. Mint [Authority: 633]
7. Yahoo! Search [Authority: 631]
8. LinkedIn [Authority: 610]
9. Adobe [Authority: 553]
10. General Motors [Authority: 537]
Bonus: 11 through 15 of the corporate blog rankings are below
11. Garmin [Authority: 502]
12. Monster [Authority: 123]
13. Southwest Airlines [Authority: 118]
14. Delta [Authority: 114]
15. Digg [Authority: 104]
Note: Click through the above brand names to get to their corporate blog and feel free to bookmark them or subscribe to their posts on your favorite RSS reader.
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Methodology: I’m using the New PR Wiki (Corporate blog listings) and Technorati authority to help navigate the corporate blogosphere terrain. This term made most sense to rank corporate blogs for 2 reasons.
1. Popularity
“It is the # of blogs linking to a website in the last 6 months. The higher the number, the more authority the blog has”.
Not only does that give a clear indication of the popularity, it also provides context for this rank in the past 6 months. You’ll be surprised at the number of dead blogs in the list, since the last ranking.
2. It’s the number of blogs vs. number of links that’s being measured
It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days
Also, if you find any corporate blog (official) that find themselves in the middle of the above rankings, please let me know by leaving a comment.
Given my experience, both starting and running a corporate blog myself, I’ll continue investigating best practices and sharing them here. If you’re interested in learning more, please consider subscribing to this blog.
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Filed under: Business Blogging
Mario Sundar's Speakeasy 
Mario:
Thanks for sharing this.. Definitely an honor to be in the Top 10. Congrats to you as well. Most importantly though, thanks for the post. I’ll flag it and use it as a reference for how Technorati’s ranking process works.
Thanks again,
LionelatDell
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Absolutely, @Lionel.
Your work at Dell, definitely sets a very high bar for other companies in this space. Glad to see companies continue to innovate in this space.
I think areas like Twitter are also social media opportunities to engage with users that you (@Dell) and myself (@Linkedin) have embraced.
More on that in a later post.
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I love that this will be an annual ranking, Mario! And we’re quite honored to be in such great company. So interesting to see the top 15, which I’ll catalog for best practice analysis! Thanks for the post.
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Sure thing, Nicki!
More importantly, I’d love to capture best practices on corporate blogging by interviewing “the keepers of the corporate blogs” at the Top 15?
Will turn to you shortly with a set of qs around Yodel and your model for success and longevity in this space.
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Nice post appreciate the information. We are Twitter buds so come visit my site anytime for a link or to say high. I also wanted to mention this URL shortner that pays you to shorten URLS http://eCa.sh/ZgQN
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nice post.
please visit to my site, if you want to something else
thanks…
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Good job on getting LI up there! I think the fact that you have a lot of guests on your blog helps a great deal.
I love LI. I’ve even been tinkering around with some of the groups for a bit.
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Thanks, Damon!
Did you notice that Mint’s blog just crept into the Top 10? Pretty interesting bunch of blogs in the Top 10, but not many surprises (barring Mint and Twitter). Well, they weren’t actually surprises but fast risers this year.
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Mario!
Thanks for including us on your list! What an honor to be included as a bonus!
Christi
@southwestair
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@Christi,
Congrats on winning the PR Web awards. Will continue tracking this space. Look forward to hearing more from you and your team over @southwestair.
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Wow. 10% is a lot! I was expecting like 1% or so.
Well 9% goes to self employed, as depicted by the graph. I guess the benefits for small businesses to use blog for outreach are quite significant!
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@ka, I’d definitely agree, but nearly 35% of Fortune 500 businesses also blog. And, another 35% plan to institute corporate blogs by end of this year.
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Mario,
I never sent you questions for a Q&A re best corporate blogs. But it’s not too late! Thanks for this useful post.
Debbie
@debbieweil
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We should work on getting the Q&A done, along the lines of best practices. Let’s chat.
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