With all the discussion on why blogging is great for man and beast (i.e. normal people and businesses) I thought I’d better give the other side of the equation. Sort of. Bear with me, this is going to be a rant.
10 reasons your business should not blog
1. You see customers as “sales” and not as people. As long as they keep giving you the money, who cares about engaging with them?
2. You’re doing fine, so why change anything? Traditional advertising has worked for years, and there’s no reason why it won’t continue to work for many years to come.
3. Blogs are OK, but you’re too busy, or important, or big to blog Hmm, maybe you could pay someone to do a blog for your company, it might become ‘viral’. The youngsters nowadays won’t notice, they are too stupid to tell it isn’t genuine.
4. You don’t trust your employees to write a blog. You think they are a bunch of lazy, unmotivated, disrespectful losers who will steal every pen and stop working every time your back is turned. Why risk giving them a voice? They don’t have any good ideas anyway.
5. You believe the marketing or P.R. department should be the ONLY place the public gets it information about the company. Any other voices will just confuse the issue.
6. You’re not ready for anything so cutting-edge or technical. Doing a blog is really hard, right? You need all kinds of expensive and complicated software, it’s certainly not something for a technophone like you.
7. Someone could say something bad about the company in the comments, and you believe that cannot be allowed to happen. It’s the first rule of business – never allow people to berate the company. (Closely followed by ‘never admit liability’).
8. You believe the public should be kept at arms length. The last thing you want is people sticking their noses into the intimate details of how the company operates.
9. You believe the web doesn’t really have a long-term future as a communication or advertising medium. It’s all just hype, it will blow over soon.
10. You have all the customers you want. Any more customers would just be a pain in the neck.
Hopefully there’s some food for thought in there. I’m certainly glad I got it of my chest :0)