Who Reads the Web Strategy Blog?

Getting information about your blog readership is challenging, as content moves off your site (RSS) it makes it more difficult to find out about your readers. In my case, most of my readers (by a landslide) consume this blog via RSS. Tools like MyBlogLog are interesting, but only a very small and engaged group uses that tool. To make it worse, readers of my blog are not leaving comments here on my blog, but rather in Friendfeed.

Now that the over all results are in from the survey, I’ll pick certain segments of the report to focus in on. First, let’s start with the community…you! The challenge with blogs are that you often don’t know who is reading. RSS can certainly hide a great deal of information about the subscribers, all by design. And technographics research indicates that not everyone will be a critic, and leave comments. On a related note, be sure to read Josh’s take on data, why it’s important, and what you should consider when reading it.

Methdology:
Survey launched, compiled by Forrester Research (along with three other blog surveys), 88 responses, based on 11,000+ subscribers. Additional data from Google Analytics, unfiltered, and last 30 days as of May 21st.

Who Reads the Web Strategy Blog:
Data based off a Forrester survey, and Google Analytics

---

Finding: A wide range of roles read, yet the largest segment is interactive marketers
Although there is a very wide range of reader responses, I’m not surprised at all that many of the readers here are interactive marketers, I see who responds via the comments, and their background is closely aligned with mine. What’s that phrase? Birds of a feather? Secondly, the second role is a strategy professional. When I think strategy, I’m thinking long-term decision making, a theme I try to incorporate throughout this blog.

“What is your primary role at your company?”

Interactive Marketing Professional + Interactive Agency (as the titles are similar)
14 responses, 12.4%

Strategy Professional
13 responses, 14.6%

Technology Marketing Professional
8 responses, 9.0%

Marketing Leadership Professional
6 responses, 6.7%

Independent Consultant
6 responses, 6.7%

Other, please specify
22 varied responses, 24.7%

---

Finding: Most readers are from United States 65.2%, then UK 7.9%
This is no surprise to me, Google Analytics confirms this. US, UK, then Canada. Now why not a stronger readership in other countries? perhaps many of my examples or North American centric, or maybe social media adoption in corporations is first being lead in US and UK.

“Which country are you based in?”

---

Finding: Most readers from small business
This was a surprised, as I think of a majority of my readers as from corporate. In reality, most identified themselves as working at smaller companies. I suspect, but can’t confirm, that because I write for corporate, that the companies trying to offer to corporate want to ‘get into the head of’ a corporate decision maker. Now this is not to say that all of the readers are from small business, and there’s clearly folks from larger corporations present.

“How many employees work for your company worldwide?”

---

Finding: Most are in the Industry of Professional Services/Consulting (20%) High-Tech Products (13.5%), Advertising (11.2%) other (18.0%)
I wasn’t surprised here, by any of these industries, it’s really the market I’m trying to reach. The topics frequently discussed here are how to convince decision makers through ROI, language, or demonstrating success for social media programs. I come from high tech (exodus, savvis, hitachi, podtech) so there’s no surprised this industry is threaded through the blog. Glad to see a handful of advertising professionals here, there’s an opportunity for both social media and advertising to come together.

“Which of the following best describes your company’s industry group? (Please select one)”

---

Finding: Most readers are beginning a social media strategy at their company
This was a question that you insisted that I ask (early, I asked what do you want to see in the survey) as you wanted to know about your peers. As suspected, there’s a lot of toe dippin’ going on, I think I attract the companies that have questions about how to get started, thus my social media FAQ series. I realize that some of my readers are craving for the advanced stuff, quite honestly, which I do talk about, except mainly with clients.

“Where is your company in terms of its online social media strategy?”

---

Related Data from Google Analytics
All data from last 30 days. I’m not sure, but do the following statistics help indicate the level of sophistication of readers? Maybe, but I’m not quite sure.

Connection Speed
Unknown
26,206 | 33.45%
Cable
21,551 | 27.51%
DSL
18,438 | 23.53%
T1
9,693 | 12.37%
Dialup
2,074 | 2.65%

Browser
Firefox
40,870 | 52.16%

Internet Explorer
29,498 | 37.65%

Josh (who I met in Tampa) has asked me to publish some visitor data from Google Analytics, please note this is a very small subset of overall readership as most consume this blog via RSS.

Top countries that visit this blog

Top US states that visit this blog

Top California cities that visit this blog (heavy activity in Silicon Valley)

Top Canadian territories who visit this blog

Top cities in UK who visit this blog

And just for Josh, who requested this additional data, top cities in Florida

Any surprises from this data? Other than most being from small business this was exactly as expected, great confirmation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 4:38 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.