The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Project

Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media and I have been working on a cool project for the past few months. I’ve been slow on my end of things in terms of getting it launched because of the intensive preparations for the conference.

Basically, this project is designed to gather the most comprehensive hub of information about what Fortune 500 companies are doing about blogging. I know there are a number of other resources out there that try to accomplish the same thing, but we’re hoping that this project can add value in a few ways.

First of all, this project is by bloggers and for bloggers. All the research will be done by people who are interested in the exciting world of business blogging. All the content will belong to the individual bloggers who do the research.

Secondly, we hope to provide qualitative information about Fortune 500 companies and their blogging initiatives. How well are they working with the blogosphere? What are bloggers saying about the company? Are they blogging internally or participating in social media in innovative ways?

So how does this work? Simple:

1. A blogger signs up on the wiki.
2. The blogger begins researching a company and posts his or her findings on his or her own blog example posts can be found here and here.
3. The blogger then copies the first 50-75 words of his or her post into the wiki with a link to their complete post about the company.
4. More bloggers join in until all Fortune 500 companies have been researched.

In addition to this effort on the part of bloggers, my fantastic boss Steve Broback and our awesome sponsorships director Eric Anderson are sponsoring a phone bank based in Delhi, India. There, our talented data gatherers will speak to marketing executives from all of the Fortune 500 and catalogue what they’re doing with blogging. This information will be added to the wiki as it becomes available to us.

Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves,“ wait a minute! This wiki is hosted at blogbusinesssummit.com! That’s fishy! They’re trying to take ownership of the hard work of good bloggers and dominate the world!”

Let me explain. Yes, we wanted to host the wiki on our domain for self-serving reasons. We want the PageRank boost, pure and simple. We’ve also committed significant resources to making this the best resource for information about business blogging anywhere on the Web. We feel like this is fair.

In the interests of egalitarianism, we want to make it clear that we don’t own any of the content written by the participating bloggers. The bloggers own their own content. We just want to link to it and reference it, making the wiki the hub from which all the information can be easily accessed. We also want to make it clear that any participant in the wiki may place an ad on the wiki for a period of time. If someone has written a book, started a new company or developed a new piece of software, they’re welcome to share that with the community. Please ping me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com for more specifics.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention something here, so I’ll probably update this post, and post again about the wiki. For some more practical details, check out Easton’s post and check out the wiki itself.

Happy blogging!