What You Lose by Not Blogging

In The Corporate Blogging Book, released this week at Amazon, author and blog expert Deb Weil offers three risks of NOT blogging that every organization should consider.

• If you don’t blog you’re not part of the conversation in the blogosphere. In other words, bloggers may be saying bad things about your company and if you’re not listening to the conversation, you have no way to respond quickly and appropriately.
• You’re missing out on a fast, efficient communications channel with your customers, the media, investors, and other important constituencies.
• If you don’t have a blog, your company Web site will soon look, er, so 1990s.

The ability to move fast, to talk to people as people, when good things or bad things are happening, is critical. Customers are already talking to each other. They learned to do that when companies traded listening to them for advertising that talked at them and interrupted them when they were eating their dinner.

Now savvy organizations are learning to find key stakeholders one by one. they are communicating in real time to get real postive and negative feedback. They’re enjoying the gratitude of customers who can’t believe they are being asked for their opinion by an organization that treats them like people of value.

Those same savvy enterprises are reaping the benefits of constantly updated blog content — content that search engines eat like candy — pushing their page ranks up without expensive search optimization services.

The irony is that nonblogging customers can’t tell a blog from a web page, and blogging customers love blogs and companies who use them.

Deb Weil is right. The risk of not blogging is becoming more significant every minute.

People do things when the benefit of doing them is higher than the risk of not doing them.

I can help. It’s what I do.

Liz Strauss