A lot of people out there in the blogosphere are talking a lot of sense about corporate/business/enterprise blogging. As Enterprise RSS says, Even the New York Times is at it.
What I don't see, however, is any discussion of how. Yes, they're "cheap", "easy to measure", "cut out the middleman", "informal, chatty, down-to-earth". Yes, yes, yes. You can stop now, we're convinced.
The bigger issue for companies who want to get in on the blogging act revolves around the more mundane practical requirements. I see a lot of articles about how companies can set up blogs, who should write them, etc. but I do feel that many are missing the "community" trick.
A corporate blogging community provides many more benefits for businesses than a collection of individual blogs:
- They are easily aggregated into a single point of entry (see blogs.borland.com and blogs.msdn.com), quickly demonstrating the breadth of depth of collective knowledge within an organisation
- They can be "controlled" by an organisation - you can ensure your community reflects your own policies, not those of an independent blog provider
- The software is cheap and simple to implement, whatever flavour of technology you prefer
- Readers can subscribe to your aggregated RSS feed, as well as individuals'
- The success of individual blogs will reflect well on the wider community - and your brand
- By consolidating category taxonomy, you can create sub-communities of interest
- All blogs within your community can be branded to reflect your organisation
Software companies seem to have got this (after all, they have a ready developer community who probably want to blog and have something useful to impart), but I see huge opportunities for associations, charities, entertainment and professional services companies.
There are probably many more, but these are the ones that strike me as being the most valuable. I will add to the list if I think of others.