43% of Firms Will be Blogging in 2012

Some 43 percent of all companies will be blogging in 2012, according to estimates by eMarketer and others. If nothing else, those sorts of statistics illustrate the explosion of ways firms can get their messages out to potential customers, as well as the explosion of all kinds of "user generated" content.

Those blogs are used for a variety of business purposes, including the creation of content marketing that can be propagated on social media.

Some 70 percent of respondents say they use social media as a way of assessing what people think about a company.

About 61 percent say they use social media to prospect for new customers.

Breaking such forecasts out by firm size, some 65 percent of small business owners now publish a blog for their company, for example. Small business blogging