How Companies Use Blogs

I stumbled across this post on Viridus News today that lists 10 corporate blogs worth reading and it briefly talks about how each of the companies uses the medium. Now I confess I have not read the entirety of each blog but I ran a quick experiment that I would like to share here.

I did a quick Google site search for each blog on the frequency of which the word "profit" or the word "sustainability" showed up. Below is a chart of the results.



It seems there are basically three groups. The first (BofA, LinkedIN, Ebay and GM) ignore sustainability. The second group is Google, Amazon, Whole Foods and Cisco that take a balanced approach. And then the last group (McDonald's and Wal-Mart) that focus the vast majority of their discussion on sustainability (and pretty much ignore profits). By the way I tried the same test with "environment" vs "profit" and got the same results.

I would argue that the perceived leaders in sustainability are the 2nd group (the balanced folks). And in some ways Wal-Mart and McDonald's may be overcompensating.

What do you think? Does this jive with your experience?