I found this article in Darwin a pretty interesting read. Titled, "Enough with Blogging Already," it outlines all the reasons why businesses will never get into blogging. Oh, it might be OK for a little one-person startup, but Big Business will never get on the blogwagon. Um, has author Graeme Thickins, a 25-year marketing and public relations professional, ever heard of a little company called Microsoft? They have scores of bloggers and, according to Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, it has given Microsoft a more human voice, something I agree wholeheartedly with. Primedia, the company I work for, is no mom-and-pop shop, either, and they supported me from the get-go when I started face2face three years ago. Rumor has it that more Primedites will be blogging in the near future, too.
And now that I've just finished up a series of articles for our magazines on how companies and associations are using blogs for their meetings and trade shows, I think this guy is just scared--as one commenter on the article says, "blogs (and the daughters and sons of blogs) will put the marketing and public relations professionals out of business."
Why? Johnnie Moore nails it in this post:
Among Thickin's reasons... Business doesn't do passion; business doesn't like gossip; buisness doesn't like doing public experiments; business doesn't bare its soul; business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close.
Each of these arguments falls at the first word; the fanciful notion of a single, monolithic thing called "business". Well, this imaginary creature may not like passion, or gossip, or public experiments... but people do, and that's probably why the numbers of bloggers keep growing.
(Thanks to Tom Asacker for the pointer!)