Edelman and Technorati Reveal Japanese Blogging Statistics

213 Japanese bloggers have participated in a study conducted by the international PR consultancy firm Edelman in collaboration with Technorati Japan. The study focused on the relations developed by bloggers with the Japanese corporate environment.

While explaining their blogging habits through multiple reasons, 70% of bloggers revealed that they use blogging to record their thoughts, 63.8% made reference to storing information and 58.7% stated that the main catalyst for blogging was the sharing of data. Raising visibility over specific issues was a reason checked by only 4.7% of the participants in the survey.

The study brought into the spot light the issue of communication between companies and bloggers on the Japanese territory. While 84.5% of the respondents admitted to using subjects related to companies, industry, services and products in their blogs, with 49.3% addressing such issues on a weekly basis and 14.6% on a daily basis, the statistics found no reciprocity from the companies. 55.4% of bloggers stated that they had never been contacted by the companies' representatives in regard to the subjects they had addressed.

"What these results show is that while Japanese bloggers are communicating about companies or products all the time, companies are not communicating with them enough, even though conventional methods of corporate communications are still more trusted in Japan compared to America," says Edelman North Asia President Robert Pickard. "This seems to argue in favor of companies supplementing their traditional one-way 'monologue' communication of messages by engaging with bloggers online through a new two-way 'dialogue' where conversations are key."

"The study was conducted/hosted by Technorati Japan from April-May 2006 (respondents voluntarily clicked a link to take the online survey, which was posted at www.technorati.jp). 213 Japanese respondents completed the survey, which was exclusively in the Japanese language (166 or 78% were male and 47 or 22% were female)," revealed the companies in the press release.