Business cannot afford to ignore Blogs

Blogging for Business Series:

Technorati tells us that a new blog is created every second, adding to the 37 million that already exist. Which according my limited math abilities equates to a mind blowing increase of a sixty-fold growth of the ‘blogosphere’ within the past three years.

A monster that keeps on growing, and growing, and…

Exponentially speaking, that means we can expect… oh to heck with it. What it all boils down to is blogging is a beast that business cannot afford to ignore (from a purely exploitive point of view of course).

The Global Village:

What makes this even more appealing is there are no geographic boundaries in blogging, making the ‘global village’ a true reality. Requiring such a small investure of capital, blogging levels the playing field so that almost anyone can participate.

But despite the accessibility, popularity and viral nature of social networking tools, it is surprising to note that big business is only now just starting to put blogging on the corporate agenda.

Damage Control:

One reason for this could be that businesses were fearful of employees becoming corporate whistle blowers. But with employment contracts becoming more prevalent big business is now actively exploiting the public relations and marketing potential that blogging has to offer. They are now realizing that it is riskier to not having a corporate blog and be left behind their competitors.

The race is on:

Some advantages that blogging has to offer are that it gives business a direct contact with customers to get feedback, and to project a warm and fuzzy face to the company. But business take note; bloggers are a savvy lot and it will not be easy to market your products or services at bloggers who take delight in exposing anything that smells of selling.

The Primary Directive:

So always remember the primary directive of business blogging. Content comes first and the sale must be done passively or risk being flamed.

All in the family:

Some businesses are implementing social network tools such as blogs and collaborative websites on their intranets to improve productivity and collaboration within the organization or to share competitive information. Along with social bookmarks and tagging companies can make the unstructured data retrievable and usable.

The bottom line:

With the ease of use, implementation, inexpense and flexibility that blogging has to offer, blogging is a technology that business of any size can no longer afford to ignore.

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