Blogging for business

I love reading my 'stats and referrers' section of my Typepad, because I invariably stumble across interesting new blogs like Bplans Blog... which is the new blog for bplans.com, owned and operated by Palo Alto Software.

As the recent Fast Company article indicates, blogging for business is on the rise. Although the article primarily references larger companies using blogging for internal communication, it does mention Scobleizer... and there are many more company blogs peeping their heads up into the blogosphere to communicate with customers. This is a terrific trend, because it's a way for customers to put a face on a usually faceless company. Bplans Blog, while allowing comments (but no trackbacks), still doesn't have a 'face' on their blog. Clicking on "About Us" reveals corporate information and a brief mention of Tim Berry, the Founder of Palo Alto Software (who you don't realize is a contributor to the blog until you scroll through the posts and see his name)... and nothing about Noah, the primary contributor to the blog.

Now, Tim and Noah, this is certainly not meant to be a criticism of your blog... although it's not quite a week old, I can tell it's going to flesh out into a great resource. But I think it surfaces a few questions about corporate blogs... Should corporate bloggers give some background on who they are? How much information should they share? What's the right balance between the face of individual bloggers and the corporations they represent?

Comments

[Dave Young]

I've taught classes on blogging. I've tried to explain it to small retailers. These are people who are not yet on the internet because they think it takes at least $10k to get any kind of site built that is more sophisticated than a DIY site built by your nephew.
The best I could do is a one-hour audio book called "Why We Blog (and you should too!)".
It was finally released yesterday and I just had to tell somebody!

But, my point is this...a business blog is a business web site that doesn't gather dust.

[noah parsons]

Thanks for the comments and feedback on the Bplans Blog! As you can tell, we're not quite ready for prime time and are just starting to experiment with the blog medium. It will be interesting to see how it plays out as a useful resource both for our employees and potentially our customers. Thanks again for checking out our new blog.