Two-Thirds of Tech Companies Don't Do Case Studies

Only one-third write white papers. Over half do neither case studies nor white papers.

My survey of high-tech company websites this week reveals that:

• 31% have white papers
• 36% have case studies
• 56% have neither cases nor white papers

The survey looked at the websites of 100 companies randomly selected from all U.S. firms with 50-999 employees in the CorpTech database in the following categories: computer hardware, computer software, telecommunications and Internet. The sampling error is plus or minus 9%. I actually sampled 120 and threw out 20 that were not appropriate -- for example, the firms might have gone out of business or CorpTech had mislabeled their industries.

(Attention marketers: there were 7007 firms in this particular CorpTech download -- so if you extrapolate that out, i.e., 20 bad names for every 100 good ones, it comes to 5600 firms, or significantly fewer than what you might have expected.)

I wasn't completely surprised by the survey's results. I did a similar survey of tech companies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire about five years ago and found that only about 40% did case histories.

This obviously raises a lot of questions about why tech companies don't showcase either their successes or their thinking more than they do. One thing is clear -- the market for writing services should be a lot more efficient. Many companies are not getting served because of barriers either real or perceived.