Another blogging survey…another headline number

Via Philip Young at Mediations, and mentioned on a few other blogs, comes news of another blogging survey conducted on behalf of David Davis of writers4business.com. This week's big headline is that only 2 out of 10 senior executives write their own blogs. My own feeling:

I wish 2 out of 10 senior executives actually even had a blog, ghost-written or not.

Looking at the methodology, we see:

The poll was conducted by qualified researchers in postal interviews with 750 senior executives in the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, and Australia during September and October 2005. The respondents, who all published company blogs, were split 65% males 35% females working in a wide range of industries and financial institutions.

Now – to me (and I could be wrong), what this means is that 750 people were sent a survey questionnaire by post – as I don't really know what else a postal interview would be. It says nothing about response rates – isn't that quite important ? I find it hard to believe that there's a well qualified list of 750 senior blogging executives out there – although if this was further broken down by company size, then it might be more understandable So, I'm reserving all judgement until I find out the above.¨ Update - I have left a trackback ping at http://www.audaciousonline.com/blog/articles/2006/01/04/33/ so I hope there is some response. Update 2 - looks like trackbacks and comments don't work on that blog - or else they are moderating silently. Frustrating when one can't get proper information. As an aside, I have noticed that people playing with metrics tend to fall silent when the numbers are probed beyond a very superficial level. Hope this doesn't happen here. Update 3 – Constantin Basturea comments that John Cass has done some investigation and the survey looks very legitimate:

Curious about the survey and how it was put together, I asked David Davis about the survey, specifically how many people answered each question, David said, "750 was the overall respondent pool. Of the 750, all were bloggers and 92% answered all the questions. The respondents were drawn from across the board industries, medium to large and mostly with in-house PR people. To obtain the 750 pool we contacted several thousand companies. There was frequent but not excessive follow up largely by email."

Impressive numbers, although I'm a bit confused about this phrase

"The respondents were drawn from across the board industries, […] mostly with in-house PR people"

at that implies to me that it was the PR people who were sent the survey and then replied ? Ghostwritten survey reponses, perhaps ! I've probably misinterpreted that phrase. So several thousand companies contacted, 750 responded. Several thousand is probably some value between 5,000 and 10,000 – which puts a pessimistic estimate of the percentage of companies with CEO blogs at between 7.5% and 15%. I'd be amazed if this turns out to be the case – either my assumption about what is "several thousand" is incorrect, or the sample is still skewed towards companies likely to be blogging. Again – it would be hugely interesting to see the breakdowns, but I expect that's confidential. What a nice data set to have ! [tags]survey, blogs, internal, corporate, metrics[/tags]