Business and Blogs: An Experiment
Some time ago, I noticed that mentioning the names of certain large businesses here on this blog had a habit of generating hits from those business. This lead me to the following hypothesis and null hypothesis:
Hypothesis: Large corporations regularly scan blogs to see what is being said about them.
Null Hypothesis: Large corporations do not care, or keep an eye on blogs.
To test this hypothesis, I have designed an experiment.
Design A new blog has been set up, with an associated e-mail address. For the time being, the name of the blog will be withheld, so as to not complicate, or compound the results. The blog has been set up on the blogger system. The reason that blogger was chosen was because of the association between blogger and Google.
The new blog has a simple subtitle, "Blogs and Business". It has been left dormant for a while, so that it can appear on various listings. A SiteMeter and a StatsCounter hit trackers have been installed. These systems will be used to establish a base line of hits.
The blog was originally set up on 11th Feb. '07. A single posting with the message "Hello World!" was put on the blog, with the title 'Beginning'. Today, the experimental phase of this study begins. A second post was added. The title for the post was 'A List'. The body of the posting was then filled with the list of the top 200 corporations in plain ASCII format, culled from the Fortune 500 list.
If the hypothesis that large corporations scan blogs is correct, then rapidly, the blog should start picking up hits. The counters thus far register a single hit, from when the corporate name list was posted. It was posted at 8.25pm CST on Monday the 5th of March '07. Now it is time to just sit back and wait and see what happens.
This is my first blog experiment. I really hope that it works. It would be great to have empirical evidence that shows that blogs are important enough for corporations to care about. It will also be interesting to see exactly which corporations (if any) are scanning blogs and which are not.
Should for some reason this experiment not produce the expected results, or weak results, further stages of the experiment have already been designed to see what produces the greatest effect. As results come in, I will share them here.
The CP
Hypothesis: Large corporations regularly scan blogs to see what is being said about them.
Null Hypothesis: Large corporations do not care, or keep an eye on blogs.
To test this hypothesis, I have designed an experiment.
Design A new blog has been set up, with an associated e-mail address. For the time being, the name of the blog will be withheld, so as to not complicate, or compound the results. The blog has been set up on the blogger system. The reason that blogger was chosen was because of the association between blogger and Google.
The new blog has a simple subtitle, "Blogs and Business". It has been left dormant for a while, so that it can appear on various listings. A SiteMeter and a StatsCounter hit trackers have been installed. These systems will be used to establish a base line of hits.
The blog was originally set up on 11th Feb. '07. A single posting with the message "Hello World!" was put on the blog, with the title 'Beginning'. Today, the experimental phase of this study begins. A second post was added. The title for the post was 'A List'. The body of the posting was then filled with the list of the top 200 corporations in plain ASCII format, culled from the Fortune 500 list.
If the hypothesis that large corporations scan blogs is correct, then rapidly, the blog should start picking up hits. The counters thus far register a single hit, from when the corporate name list was posted. It was posted at 8.25pm CST on Monday the 5th of March '07. Now it is time to just sit back and wait and see what happens.
This is my first blog experiment. I really hope that it works. It would be great to have empirical evidence that shows that blogs are important enough for corporations to care about. It will also be interesting to see exactly which corporations (if any) are scanning blogs and which are not.
Should for some reason this experiment not produce the expected results, or weak results, further stages of the experiment have already been designed to see what produces the greatest effect. As results come in, I will share them here.
The CP
posted by The Combat Philosopher at 8:43 PM
1 Comments:
CP, If you haven't seen already, heres a little gift:
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