Corporate Blogging

A new report from eMarketer includes this statement: "...blogs can bend Web traffic, upend organic search results, and tarnish a brand or a company. But blogs can also burnish brands, generate awareness, and open doors to consumers." That's attributing a lot of power to something that the same survey indicates only 4% of major US companies have public blogs. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there's an even smaller percentage of Americans who even know the definition of a blog.

While I've seen the power of blogs demonstrated repeatedly over that last year or two, I have to agree with eMarketer's findings that they are run by the "little guys." Certainly there are some large companies like Microsoft that permit their employees to run blogs, there are very few that use them effectively.

A group I've done work for created a blog. Except, really what they created was a page of unrelated commentary that wasn't updated very often. It also lacked the typical feedback mechanism associated with a blog making it much less engaging. What's the point of starting a conversation about something interesting and then not letting users join in on the conversation?