BlogWorks: Shortage of qualified corporate bloggers in Europe

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May 17, 2007

Shortage of qualified corporate bloggers in Europe

By Kai Blum

Are you an experienced corporate blogger? Thinking about moving to Europe? Now would be a good time, because your expertise is currently in high demand there.

According to EuroBlog 2007, a recently published survey among 409 PR professionals from 24 European countries, the number of professionals that read and run blogs has roughly doubled in one year and commenting has increased fivefold:

79% read blogs (up from 37% in 2006)
38% run blogs (up from 21%)
51% comment on blogs (up from 10%)

However – and this is remarkable - the same PR professionals name an interesting set of factors that limit the use of blogs by their organizations:

Lack of employees with the right skills (69%)
Cannot demonstrate ROI from weblogs (42%)
Concern about legal issues (34%)
Not possible to measure impact of their social media activity (34%)
Cannot control reader comments (32%)

They also name the biggest challenges using blogs:

Integrating blogs into communications strategy (88%)
Having time to blog regularly (83%)
Reacting to comments (83%)
Creating content and ideas for posts (80%)

But they also recognize the opportunities that weblogs offer:
Environmental scanning (seeing what is going on) (81%)

Opportunity of authentic communications (77%)

Fast reaction time to issues (74%)

Receiving feedback from the audience (73%)

Last, but not least: Employing professional blog monitoring services saw a sharp rise from 6% in 2006 to 20% in 2007. That’s still pretty low, in my opinion, and there may be many job and business opportunities there as well.

Posted by Alicia Dorset at May 17, 2007 04:33 PM