Some sobering news did the rounds recently: Germany is still firmly in the developing world when it comes to blogging. No, this is not a late April Fool’s joke, even if the current UPS Europe Business Monitor was published at the beginning of April. And the figures aren’t getting any brighter, no matter which colours we use for our bar charts and pie graphs.

The Germans are trailing way behind the rest of Europe in the illustrious blog league. Take a little closer look at the results and you could be forgiven for thinking that the blog god lives and works in France. Whilst 57% of all managers interviewed in Germany did not know what blogs were, this figure was just 16% in France. What a difference! But what could be the reasons for this?

Here are some completely subjective thoughts from me:

• Managers who get their secretaries to print out their emails because they can’t or don’t want to work their email programs, are bound to be left behind in the blogging evolution of mankind.
• The majority of decision-makers in the so-called top 15,000 companies in Europe are over 50-years-old and simply use other means, e.g. internal sources, to make decisions and gain access to information.
• Even if managers have heard of blogs they often lack the courage to post their thoughts in writing – across the world. Someone might read it after all. Not to be forgotten: “business blogging” only forms a small part of the entire study and 29% of all those interviewed had heard of weblogs. Better than nothing I suppose.

But the question remains: what are we going to do with the 1% of managers that read blogs and blog themselves?