Why Corporations Truly Need to Blog

Thanks for your kind words. I’ll try to respond in the same magnanimous spirit.

Online reputation management—There really isn’t a better platform for an in-depth response to criticisms you find all over the Internet. I omitted this from my post, but I’ll include it here:

“An example: have you seen news coverage stating that xylitol kills dogs? Guess what—it doesn’t. There is scant anecdotal evidence of xylitol’s negative effects—including cases where dogs that ate huge amounts of gum and chocolate with their xylitol. The truth is, there have been studies done for decades, and even feeding dogs a diet of 20% xylitol over two years didn’t kill them (ref).

“You can’t find anything exonerating xylitol until page three of Google SERPs for ‘xylitol dog.’ Disclosure: my husband works for a xylitol company. Imagine if they had a blog that customers, potential customers and the media read could find easily. A blog post exposing a popular myth—why, that sounds like textbook linkbait. A press release? Probably not. Without a blog, they’ll have to wait until Snopes covers it—and even then, it’s too late now [months and months after the urban legend has been covered by mainstream media] to even begin to undo the damage already done to their product image.”

My husband’s employer did release a press release within days of the mainstream media stories. It’s even lower in the SERPs than the dense research exonerating xylitol cited above. If they had a blog, I maintain that they could much more easily, adeptly and appropriately address consumers’ (and pet owners’) fears in a place and a way that customers (and media) would actually read.

Getting your visitors’ input—By the time you get to be a large corporation, you do understand a thing or two about customer relations. If you have, say, 292 comments on your post about your site redesign, and 90% of them are negative, you might want to reconsider. Whack jobs will get to you no matter what—I’ve seen letters, heard phone calls and read e-mails from “whack jobs.” Any method of contact is susceptible to “whack jobs.” Is it better to not hear from customers at all?

Getting your visitors’ negative input—I vociferously disagree that “negative input will totally overwhelm just about anything positive you had to say.” Take, for example, the blog of MSN’s Live Search. Who doesn’t love to hate MSN? Yet their comments are mostly (say 60%) positive and constructive. Yes, commenters criticize and even berate Live Search, just like the rest of us. Is it better to ignore everything your consumers want to say about your product and company than to have some idea what people really dislike about your company, so you have some chance of improving that aspect? (I also think that people reading a blog have at least some inclination to take comments with a grain of salt since, as you put it, “every whack job with an Internet connection” can and will comment. They can also see a public display of your public relations skills in how you handle unfavorable comments.)

Maintaining your focus—This point didn’t say, “Manage a relationship with each commenter/casual visitor that meanders through your blog.” It did say, “You get to devote time to thinking about what your customers think about, what they want, what they’re looking for.” I realize this wasn’t clear, but I intended that to refer to the time you spend brainstorming and planning posts. Again, large corporations have probably learned a thing or two about customer relations. If you’re really that popular, you’ve probably already dealt with the crush of input and learned how to respond to the thousands of people clamoring for your attention every day.

It makes you human—My son poops in public all the time and no one has ever said anything negative about it. (That’s a joke; he’s 1.) Actually, I daresay that pooping in public makes you not ‘human’ but ‘animal.’ I can’t think of any corporations that would benefit from being perceived as ‘animal,’ but many that would benefit from being perceived as ‘human.’