Fortune 500 Blogging

Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) has announced the Fortune 500 Business Blog Index, a new resource created in collaboration with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext.

Chris and Ross have both provided more background on their respective TypePad-powered blogs, but at its heart, the idea is simple:

This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.

So the first value this list presents to the Professional Network community is clear: It's a sterling set of references when you want to show your customers that Six Apart blogging tools are solid platforms that they can trust. Just among the first few examples, we can see Movable Type-powered sites by Cisco, Motorola, Honeywell and Avaya. And those are in addition to many others that aren't listed or that we've previously mentioned on our site, such as Wal-Mart, General Motors and Boeing. Add on top of that the TypePad-powered blogs run by companies ranging from Amazon to Viacom's VH1, and you should be able to find a useful reference for almost any industry that your clients are interested in.

More important than the names of the companies that are blogging, though, is the bottom line: only 4% of Fortune 500 companies blog. While we're happy to power blogs for many of these companies with our platforms, the exciting news is the potential that this number represents for those of you who are consultants, developers, designers, or systems integrators. There's a lot of work out there for people with skills and experience in blogging.

We think most companies can grow their businesses by smart use of blogging, and we're looking forward to helping to grow the percentage of companies who are using blogs either inside their organizations or to communicate with the web at large. And when these new blogs come online, it will happen thanks to our Professional Network members. Many of the blogs already deployed were planned, deployed, or maintained with the help of current ProNet members. With your work to help educate, engage, and enlist these companies in participating in blogging, we'd expect that these lists will look much different a year from now.