In addition to stopping at B&N, I stopped at the library. On a whim, I did a search on blog in the electronic card catalog. The book that came up was We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. I checked it out to find out what they had to say about business and blogging.
They spend a chapter talking about using blogs in business. Here is what they have to say about adding blogs to an external site:
- People return to sites that are trusted providers of information – blogs make websites more addictive and give people a reason to come back more often. By providing information your customers are interested in, weblogs build trust, inspire consumer confidence, and strengthen your brand.
- Keeping customers up-to-date – weblogs are a great way to talk about news items both big and small.
- Point people inside the site – I like this one alot. You can use your weblog to get people to the new content on your site. This might be a hot job posting or a new product.
- Consistent location for news and information – people always know where to look for the latest goings-on at the company.
- Update on your timeframe – Weblogs give users the ability to easily update the website with new content.
These ideas also describe everything that is great about weblogs in general. My question is why aren’t more businesses using them?