Dave Sifry reports on the State of the Blogosphere. His summary:

- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Even Dave marvels at the adoption rate of blogging, as shown by the exponential growth curve.

Although marketers aren’t faring well according to two recent surveys, Seth Godin offers hope in the form of 5 Things Every Marketer Should Realize:

1. You are not in charge. You used to be. You used to be able to dictate what people saw or heard or believed. Now, though, with all the choices in the b2b and in the consumer environments, you’re just a blip.

2. No one really cares about you. At least not as much as you do.

3. You can’t bury the truth. It doesn’t make sense to sneak around or to deemphasize the bad stuff. That’s a feature. Treat it that way. Consumers of all kinds want to know what you know.

4. People buy stories, not features, and not even benefits. They embrace stories that are authentic, that align with their world view and then, if you’re truly lucky, they spread them.

5. Stuff you make (not your factory, you, because you as a marketer are responsible) has a life after it leaves your hands. And more and more, you’re going to be held responsible for that life.

And the bonus:

Marketing has more power and impact and reach than it has ever had before. Marketing, more than politics or religion, is changing our world.

Christopher Kenton wrote this summary of a recent study by the CMO Council. The results ain’t pretty, as these highlights indicate:

[The] study revealed an astonishing lack of direct customer involvement, with marketers relying heavily on the sales force to initiate customer engagements.

Two-thirds of the respondents . . . said they had no formal system for tracking marketing’s role in customer acquisition, retention and value creation . . .

Three-quarters of respondents said they had no dashboard system for modifying marketing spending . . .

Kenton conducted his own study to assess attitudes toward sales and marketing. As he reports in this article, there was no consensus among the study’s participants on the ultimate purpose of marketing. Christopher explains:

The picture that emerged was an astonishing lack of a guiding principal for marketing at most corporations. At some companies, marketers are short order cooks serving up a platter of collateral for the sales team. Other companies give a little more leash, with marketers fishing up leads to dump into the sales hopper. At some companies, marketing wears a boardroom suit at the strategy table, while at others, marketing is the token domain for creative types who use iMacs to dream up branding campaigns. Far too few are the companies where marketing encompasses a multi-faceted system that marshals all available resources to cultivate the forces of supply and demand.

So . . . marketers don’t connect directly with customers, can’t define their impact, and can’t find two people who agree on what marketing’s role should be. Ouch.