Chris Anderson from Wired and Ross Mayfield from Socialtext have created a list of Fortune 500 companies with active blogs which they define as “Active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.”

Perhaps more interesting than compiling this list — and opening it to wiki vandals everywhere — are their plans for the future:

Once we’ve got this list in pretty good shape, we plan to add share price data to create a Business Blogging Index, comparing the stock performance of companies that blog with those that don’t. An early spreadsheet version (.xls) of that with a snapshot of this list from 12/30/05.

Something that would be cool to add that I didn’t see was a dynamic OPML file of all the Fortune 500 blogs (thus far a small list). Since it is a wiki, it wouldn’t be too difficult for somebody to add this OPML file if/when it exists. This way interested parties could keep up with Fortun 500 blog activity without having to travel directly to the wiki. Furthermore, a niche search engine could be created that returns results only from Fortune 500 blogs. Right now, that list is pretty small according to their findings: 19 members out of 500 (4%).

Anderson and Mayfield seem primarily interested in determining what impact a company blogging or not has in relation to their share price performance. This curiosity, in part, was prompted by a dinner discussion with Doc Searls who suggested that big companies may only do business blogging if they are under duress.

These are Anderson and Mayfield’s current findings as of this writing:

And, for what it’s worth with such a small sample size, the average trailing 12-month share performance of the blogging members was +2%, while the non-blogging members was +19%. So although the statistics aren’t good enough to confirm Doc’s theory, they do point in the right direction.

So if a company is doing well does it mean that they don’t need to blog? Or perhaps by blogging they are worried they might screw up their success? These are interesting questions. As I look through my tech stock portfolio I’m reminded that my two best performing stocks are at odds with each other: Apple doesn’t blog and Google does. The former does no business blogging and in fact at times has behaved somewhat antagonistic towards blogs and the latter not only blogs but owns one of the largest free hosted blog sites (blogspot).

I’m not sure any definitive correlation can be drawn between whether or not a big company blogs or not because despite 100+ million blogs in existence, I don’t think there are as many readers. Compare that to customers, particularly senior citizens, a percentage of which are about to or already have begrudginly entered the computer era. How many senior citizens read blogs, really? We don’t know. Compare that demographic to the number who do business with Fortune 500 blogs?

Not trying to rain on the blog parade, but I believe the vast majority of blog readers are bloggers themselves. That leaves a significant number of people not drinking the blog Kool-aid that buy products/services from these Fortune 500 companies.

If a study could be done that showed a significant percentage of a Fortune 500 companie’s customers read blogs, that might encourage the non-bloggers to jump aboard. Of course, look at Apple who arguably has a large percentage of their customer base reading blogs. This hasn’t persuaded them to start and their share price has ballooned in 2005.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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