• interchange of experience between the leading market players;
• customer and industry advocating through developing Social Media Code of Ethics;
• promoting new approaches to PR and marketing;
• social media trainings;
• professional community building;
• developing industry standards.

“Social media market is growing in Russia,” said Anna Rokina, NetMind research director. “And we really need some quality standards and guidelines to be developed for those working here. We also need some measurement standards for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising and promotional campaigns being implemented in social media”. 

The Social Media Association has its steering committee with:
Edelman Imageland Russia (Olga Rasulova), Netmind. Social Media (Anna Rokina), SK Content Group (Sergey Kuznetsov), Redkaya Marka interactive marketing company (Anton Popov), Comunica agency (Mikhail Umarov), IPSOS, Affect agency, BigIdea and ArtStyle MEDIA advertising & communication agency.

The Association will join Russian companies communicating with their customers through social media and blogosphere, agencies offering promotion in social media and doing it effectively, experts and freelancers working with social media and industry analysts and researchers.

The most popular in Russian corporate blogosphere format is collective – 51% (two or more bloggers working over the same blog), Community – 10% (several authors-columnists blogging for one friend-feed), personal – 15%, non person (no direct author, often corporate interest) – 24%. Almost 40% of the corporate bloggers are simply «appointed blog-supervisors» by the company headquarters. Any other pro-active employee amount to 47%. And top management makes some 13%.

Typical corporate blog is owned by IT company. It has several authors, with the employees of the company writing to as an addition to corporate web-site. So, the blog is a kind of a corporate website’ sidekick.

Most bloggers consider communicating the main objective of blogging (using it as an extra channel) – 58%. Others deem to have better feedback from clients and partners – 24%. Some still prefer using blogging for other purposes (very rare answer, but there are few – to be more transparent) – 12%. And only 6% use blogs as their only communication channel.

The target audiences of most corporate blogs in Russia are potential clients (32%), loyal clients (24%), B2B partners (22%) and potential employees/applicants for the job (14%). It’s amazing how little is attributed to influence mass media (8%). But it’s highly likely to change in the next poll – as most bloggers working for the corporations feel rising interests to their blogs on the part of internet and mainstream media (over 90% of corporate bloggers say the media show much interest in their information).

Corporate bloggers think that their blogs are most helpful in ADV and marketing (54%), PR and Media relations (31%), HR and hiring new employees (15%). The bloggers already see some key advantages of blogging: 31% of them see the increase of brand recognition, 27% see increase in sales and  16% – increase of their corporate web-site incoming traffic.

Blog content analysis show the most preferable patterns of blogging. The first one is «all in one» – the blog about anything at least somehow relevant to corporate interest (corporate trivia, business operations, personal impressions, staff appointments etc.). The second is a «niche-blogging» – specialty interest, focusing on the very specific fields of the company’s specialization.

On my opinion, the main problem of the corporate blogs is the initial mis-targeting in placement. Unlike most of western corporate blogs, which are stand-alone blogs, most of Russian corporate blogs are based on livejournal.com blog hosting server, which is widely considered to be the place for personal information exposure (personal diaries, lifestyle, celebrities, yellow-reporting, gossips, info-leaks etc.).

There are some examples of corporate blogs in Runet:

Corporate blog of MIF Publish house – blog.mann-ivanov-ferber.ru
Alfa Bank blog-community – community.livejournal.com/moneyblog_ru
Norilsk Nikel (industrial company) – community.livejournal.com/norilsk_metal
Red Graphic (popular design studio ) - blog.redgraphic.ru
All Soft (IT company) - blog.allsoft.ru