Our Ignorance of technology and blogging

In a recent article in the Weekend Australian Financial Review ‘Ignorance is anything but bliss’, Craig Murray notes that “managers of Australian owned companies have a resistance in general to wanting to know anything about an underlying technology”.

 

The article points to the inefficiency of the Australian corporate sector in understanding or listening to the science behind high technology products and notes its inability to maximise the efficiency of our innovative systems.

 

According to the article, “listening to technology is standard practice in the United States”, however “despite all the noise and enthusiasm for blogging, senior execs are still not "getting" corporate blogging, according to a new Harris Interactive survey”.

 

Short for ‘weblog’, a blog is a website that combines text, images and links in a kind of personal journal and enable the blogger to share news and opinion instantly and worldwide. According to blog search engine Technorati, there are more than 37 million blogs on the Internet today and over 75,000 are being created every day.

 

However, despite being given the means to create an interactive relationship with their clients through blogging, only 8% of corporate executives in the Fortune 1000 list believe that a blog is an effective communication or sales generation tool.

 

Appropriately, in Andy Beal’s blog, ‘Fortune 1000 Execs Still Not Embracing Blogging’, the previous statistic is rationalised by saying that only 30% of those surveyed actually understood what an internet blog is and furthermore that 77% of those surveyed said that the issue of blogging needed to be further developed within their company.

 

"Whether they are used to demonstrate expertise, share knowledge, improve customer satisfaction levels, support a product brand or burnish a company's reputation, blogs should be an essential element of every corporation's communications strategy," says Robbin S. Goodman, Executive Vice President of Makovsky + Company, a leading independent global public relations and investor relations consultancy.

 

An indication of the inevitability of corporate blogging is given by Humphrey Taylor, Chairman of The Harris Poll®, Harris Interactive, who notes that blogging is a “medium which is set to grow rapidly and to become very important to corporations around the world."

 

Thus, it appears that the implementation of corporate blogging may in fact be an opportunity for corporate Australia to ‘listen to the benefits of technology‘ and overtake America in becoming more innovative, and technologically advanced.

 

It seems the lag in blogging will soon be rectified.