More Companies Quit Blogging, Go with Facebook Instead (USA Today)

A survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth of 500 fast-growing companies listed by Inc. magazine, found companies maintaining blogs fell 37% in 2011 from 50% the year before. The Pew Research Center reported blogging among adults ages 18 to 33 fell 2 percentage points in 2010 from 2008. “Blogging requires more investment,” said Nora Ganim Barnes, a professor at the university who wrote the report. “You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation.” According to Barnes, some companies went straight to social-media tools. Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency public relations firm, says many corporate blogs don’t win readers because they exist to pitch products and are poorly written. “Companies don’t understand that the content on a blog shouldn’t be ‘about me.’ Such information tends to be dull.”