Should businesses blog?

There are many good reasons why a company should start a blog -- but it's not a decision any business should enter into lightly. Careful thought, planning, a willingness to change the culture and an ability to manage that change are all needed for a corporate blog to succeed.

Those were the recurring themes from today's late-morning sessions at the Blog Business Summit. Leading off a panel on corporate blogging strategy, Matthew Oliphant, founder of Business Logs, listed several reasons why a company should blog. Topping it was the notion that a company should take part in the virtual conversation about its products and services that customers are already having via blogs and message boards. That happens whether or not the company is involved -- and Oliphant argued that it couldn't afford not to be.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, later amplified that during his session during on marketing strategies. All of that user-generated commentary gets indexed by search engines and becomes easily accessible to potential customers doing research on a company. The most innocuous comment posted on an obscure blog can generate positive or negative buzz that impacts a company's reputation in unexpected ways. "A lot of consumer-generated media is dominating the shelf and brand impressions are being generated by this dynamic," he explained.

And it's not only consumers who use search engines for background research: journalists, analysts, lawyers and regulators do, too. "This is where companies are deeply exposed on the Internet," Blackshaw said.

Oliphant cited other benefits to blogging, too, including putting a human face on a company, increasing customer service agility and getting faster feedback.

There are drawbacks as well, of course. Lenn Pryor, director of platform evangelism at Microsoft, emphasized that a company must be prepared to take criticism and accept honest feedback. "If you have skeletons in your closet, if you have product problems, if you have customer problems, you're going to take some lumps." For many businesses, that could require extreme changes for the organizational culture.

In fact, some companies might not want to blog at all if they're not ready to participate in a dialogue. One audience member pointed out some companies simply lack the infrastructure, resources or policies to handle "bidirectional communications" with their customers.

"If you're not prepared to deal with it," Pryor agreed, "you're stepping into a pile of doodoo that you won't be able to clean up easily."

He shared a list of basic guidelines that Microsoft bloggers are asked to follow:

• In short ... "be smart" --
• Respect your existing confidentiality agreements
• Don't break news, don't disclose confidential info
• Be cautious with third party info
• Respect prior employers
• Identify yourself as being affiliated with the company
• Be cautious in how you offer support or advice
• Speak for yourself
• Think about reactions before you hit "post"

These rules are not formal policy, he emphasized. In fact, he opined that drawing up exhaustive rules that have been vetted by the lawyers is likely to confuse employees and actually discourage blogging activity.

How to pull it off successfully? Oliphant offered several tips, including experimenting with an internal blog first, perhaps for project management, and holding a "blogging mini-summit" in house to make sure all employees understand the goals and policies. He also suggested creating an internal blog or wiki for tracking and discussing topics that shouldn't be discussed on a public blog.

The ideal corporate bloggers, he said, are employees who are passionate about the company and what it does. But, he noted, anyone chosen to be the company's de facto voice needs to understand the risks and potential consequences if they do something wrong.

"You have to be open," he explained. "You have to say you may mess up, and each situation is going to be taken in turn, but potentially you could be fired, and potentially you could get a huge bonus and become the president of the company because we love you so much."

(See Jennifer Rice's write-up of the corporate blog strategy session for more tips and insights.

And see this photo of an amusing moment during Blackwell's talk.)