BLOGGERS: YOU'RE BEING MONITORED BY CORPORATE AMERICA

For grins or grimaces: I just got a research report from the Corporate Executive Board, of which I'm a member, entitled "Communications' Response to Blogs: Capitalizing on an Emerging Medium."

It was inevitable. Create an alternative media and Corporate America will look for a way to co-opt it.

Some excerpts:

According to dictionary publisher Merriam Webster, online readers looked up the word 'blog' more than any other term in 2004...A new blog emerges every 2.2 seconds, totaling 38,000 new blogs per day...Readers and bloggers add 5.8 blog posts per second...45% of North America's largest 1,000 corporations are currently blogging or considering a corporate blog.
...
Council findings indicate that leading companies utilize the following strategies to leverage the increasing influence and potential of blogs: Monitor and influence blogs in the media sphere: Given blogs' transformation of the media landscape, leading companies monitor and interact with bloggers to influence coverage and rapidly respond to potential threats...

In other words, Corporate America will be monitoring your blog and contributing comments that play to their advantage...pay attention to the identity of commmenters and the reliability of the information you receive from them. This shouldn't be as much of a threat to progressive blogs, since we tend to check everything, as to the wingnuts...but they'll be much more prone to disseminate the corporate slant on news. We'll have to be vigilant.