Jupiter Research Makes Some Changes
07/13/2006
Checking blog stats one finds interesting links .. a referral to David Schatsky's, President JupiterKagan, blog. Both David and Greg Dowling, the Jupiter Research analyst of the infamous Jupiter Research corporate weblog study, provide additional information about the methodology and the results .. some are rather surprising.
Sidebar: If you missed the threads here's a link to the back-story.
David Schatsky's post is titled Bashed By The Blogosphere For Our Blog Research. My high level take aways ..
- Jupiter will do better interfacing with "interested parties" (as long as they don't perceive you to be a competitor).
- They will look into how to provide more methodology information so "interested parties can better interpret the information."
- David will personally talk to Jupiter Research's "PR firm and provide them with clearer guidelines on how to handle inquiries from bloggers in the future, and (he'll) look into providing a bit more information in news releases as well, at least in the versions we post on our site.
Sidebar: If anyone from Jupiter Research or Peter Arnold Associates is popping by (or any other research firm), I suggest you check out the AAPOR Press page for specific guidelines on what an organization is ethically obligated to provide to the public. I had an interesting chat with Tom Guterback, 2006-07 Ethics Chair of AAPOR and director of the University of VA Center for Research, this afternoon. Disclosure of research methodology applies to any publicly cited research finding including media releases.
However, the company is only obligated to provide information the pertains directly to the results revealed. Although Jupiter Research offers general information about the process of their research methodology, it by no means meets the standards of AAPOR Ethic Guidelines for disclosure of specific results.
I strongly encourage anyone who has posted information regarding the results of this study to read Greg Dowling's post. No one that I read got it right. The "...nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006." did not refer to marketing or business bloggers but to "Web site decision makers from companies with more than $50 million in revenue."
Directly from Greg's post:
"It should also be noted that the term " "Weblogs" in the context of this report (and press release) does not differentiate between external Weblogs or internal "dark" Weblogs and is referring to the deployment of Weblog authoring technology not the creation of customer facing Weblogs.
To reiterate, the survey respondents were Web site decision makers with budget authority asked about technology deployments, not marketers asked about their use of Weblogs. However, marketers were surveyed for the data point, "Only 32 percent of marketing executives said they use corporate Weblogs to generate WoM around their company's products or services."
I appreciate everyone's support and comments on Diva and on so many great blogs. Thanks to Fard and to Neville for staying the course on this one. Working together we might have made a difference in the way a company conducts business that will result in a win-win that positively impacts the blogging and marketing research industires.
As Mack, Dave, Eric and Ann would say this is what it means to belong to a community ~ where the voice of one turns into the voices of many.
Sidebar: Lou woulda liked this one!
Technorati Tags: Jupiter_Research, JupiterKagan, David_Schatsky, Greg_Dowling, Marketing_Research, Business_Blogs, PR, Bloggers_Relations
