In a recent article entitled Business Blogging, Jack Schofield of The Guardian ponders the reasons why more companies don’t have weblogs. He points to ” … a few pioneering American examples, such as Walt Disney and the state of Utah, but otherwise blogging seems to be a personal rather than a corporate stratagem.”
One potential reason that he suggests:
“Businesses and governments just don’t get it, because they don’t see the difference between the medium and the message. It’s like someone looking at a printing press and saying: ‘Well, Mr Gutenberg, that’s very interesting, but there is a finite market for Bibles.'”
I’ve wondered why blogging has been slow to catch on in the business world, too. It seems like a simple way to communicate with your constituents, internal and external. After all, if you are an expert on the service or product that you sell, and if you are presumably following industry news anyway, doesn’t it then make sense that you would want a platform for sharing that expertise with clients, vendors, and your industry at large?
Maybe it’s caution on the part of corporate lawyers. Maybe it’s not being able to think outside of the traditional advertising box. Maybe some large companies are trained to think of *solutions* as always having a big price tag. Or maybe it just takes a while for things to filter into the boardroom. Even tech companies don’t seem to be blogging in any large numbers – journalists, attorneys, physicians, consultants, and marketers seem to be in the vanguard on the business blogging front.
Be sure to check out some of the business blogging pioneers under Business Weblogs in our sidebar. The Guardian article also has links to several business blogs and resources on blogging.
Tags: blogs
