When it comes to blogs, companies just don’t get it.

Oh, it’s not that they don’t understand what a blog is or what it can do. In many cases they do. It’s just that they just don’t want it.

You see, blogs are difficult children at the best of times and consuming beasts at their worst.

When They’re Good, They’re Very Good
…and when they’re bad, they’re horrid.

We’ve all heard stories of how a young Internet junkie comes up with a great blog idea and becomes a millionaire in just a few months. Well, at least the stories are good.

Truth is, blogging is research, writing and more writing. You have to update most blogs at least once a week and even simple stories take some good amount of think-time and preparation. And if you don’t do a good job editing, it’s just comes out lame.

So, blogging is work. Every day, every week.

Unfortunately, this fact seems to escape most folks when they start up a blog. That’s why there are 71-million blogs and less than 5-million are updates each month. But 5-million active blogs is still a lot of content.

MeMe Blogs

There are a plethora (great word) of personal, political and themed commercial blogs. So many that, from a corporate point of view, it’s difficult to find and present suitable examples of how other corporations use blogs to promote and market their products and services. And there may be a reason for that.

In surveys of corporate executives we learned that 62% of those asked said that they did not consider blogs to be a valid communications medium, 74% did not seem them as brand building techniques and 70% said they could not be used to generate sales leads.

In the same survey, only 15% of the companies currently have a blog of any kind (many have internal only blogs) and only 8% are considering establishing a blog. On the negative side, 3% reported that their policies regarding products and services have changed because of something that was written in a blog.

Uncontrollable

The final straw came when the execs were asked why companies do not have blogs and the majority reported that they are uncontrollable (which is not true) and pose a liability threat.

It’s understandable why so many companies shy away from blogs. Blogs are a lot of work, and they invite consumers to say their piece — good or bad. That’s messy and something that most company cannot cope with easily. As much as we hear how companies want to hear from their customers, creating a channel for unfiltered feedback is filled with peril.

First, you must understand that blogs are absolutely controllable. Neither the posting of articles or the flow of comments can happen unmoderated unless that’s the way you want it to be. We can completely control everything that goes up on the blog.

The danger here is trying to employ a blog to do something for which it will not work. Blogs are inherently two-way communications vehicles. Organizational marketing, most often, is built on one-way communications. That creates a tremendous conflict, you see.

Like-Minded and Same-Purposed
In most organizations, blogs work perfectly as employee communications tools or for closed group functions like customer service and other places where the audience is like-minded and of the same purpose. Look around and you may find many such uses in your company where open dialog communications will be useful. We see executive management groups, boards, committees all using blogs to freely communication with one another. We see volunteer groups, peer professional groups, product and service user groups and many other groups using blogs to full advantage. The important condition here is that each of these groups is an existing collection of individuals who are already pulling their oars in the same direction for the same goal or purpose.

That’s not to say that blogs can’t be valuable marketing tools. They sometimes can. But only if employed with clear purposes in mind.

Your organization may be slow to see the merit of blogging and even slower to employ them. But no worries, it will come around when you outline an understandable path with specific goals, tightly defined audiences and clear processes to gain security and control. Then, your management will begin seeing this important communications tool for what it can do, and not what it cannot.

steve