Friday, January 12, 2007

Blog influence in Asia

The thought of PR companies trying to master the world of blogging is one that makes me a bit nervous. And, as this is the second time in recent weeks that we have mentioned Edelman's blog-related activities, they clearly are having a serious run at it.

Rebecca MacKinnon, newly-arrived in Hong Kong (welcome!), points to this study of global blog readership published by the company. She was not surprised by the extent to which decision-makers (I'd have to read the study properly to find out what they mean by that) rank blogs as important in Japan, Korea and China compared to the US and Europe. I have to confess that I was very surprised, particularly to see that as many as 91% in Japan said they were reading blogs.

This study is linked to Edelman's tie-up with Technorati about which we wrote on 31st December. I have my suspicions that the audience being polled were mainly bloggers and thus the oddly high results. I don't believe that a truly random selection of Japanese decision-makers would generate a number anything like as high as 91%. But, maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Japan is a developed country. The country has internet access and the people are very tech savvy. I do not see any problem if the country ranks highest in terms of blog reading.

hemartin said...

This stats received lots of critic and the Edelman's tie-up with Technorati is over ...

Paul Woodward said...

Mehdi and Hugo, thanks for your posts.

Mehdi, I think you misunderstand my point. Of course, Japan is an advanced country with many Internet users, blog writers and readers. However, I do not believe that as many as 91% of influencers (whatever that means) are reading blogs. The most influential people in Japan tend to be older and not significant technology users. And, I believe it is extremely unlikely that they are reading blogs.

As Hugo points out (and as I posted a week or so ago), the study looks very suspect and that was the point of my post.

hemartin said...

Edelman Gives Up Tracking Chinese (and S-Korea) Blogs
http://www.chinatechnews.com/2007/01/09/edelman-gives-up-tracking-chinese-blogs/

Paul Woodward said...

Thanks Hugo. I did actually cover it here (http://bsgasia.blogspot.com/2006/12/edelman-technorati-and-asia.html) on 31st December. I quoted Steve Ruebel's comment "Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture".