Conversation Agent: Top Ten Reasons Why Your Company Should not Have a Blog

I wrote a post a week or so ago about 3 things you should know before starting a blog and we had a very good conversation around those themes. In the comments, Mack Collier added two things that I feel should be highlighted:

1 - Your blog does not have an expiration date. You have to start blogging with the mindset that it's going to be something that you will do from now on.

2 - Your blog WILL suck at first. Accept this. As you become more familiar with the space, and the tool, your efforts will improve. But you have to realize going in that those first few days/weeks/months, you might not see that traffic move much. You might not get many (any?) comments. Don't be discouraged by then, stick with it, interact with others, learn from others, and your efforts will improve.

And here's the thing, if you're a person looking to build a business, especially if it has your name on it, you may look at the advice - all of the advice shared at the post - and decide to go with it, to do it. There is good potential there, if you stick with it, that after your fail, you will succeed. Because you are willing to try and fail.

It's not the same for businesses. Businesses are often unwilling to try before they fail, so they fail without even trying. My friend Peter inspired this line of thinking in a recent comment. Is it because of arrogance, the idea that human failure is somehow greater or worse than the failure of outrageous fortune (I see signs of this in the current unwillingness to change our relationship with the environment), he asked.

Trying is hard, it means you have to put attention and effort into building something from nothing sometimes. And to build it on sites other that your own - if you want to have a community, you better be part of a community. These are two things that as a corporate marketer you may not like very much.

In that case, we can find more reasons why your company should not have a blog:

(1) You get part time results for part time effort - and you are constantly checking the needle to see if it moved instead of working on moving people with your passion and exceptional products.

(2) You never heard of a never ending "campaign" - called building permission-based relationships and learning with the community. That's what all those people with no lives do with Twitter and it has nothing to do with business.

(3) You publish only "perfect" posts - what's this thing about being spontaneous and in the moment? We have talking points for sounding human and staying on message.

(4) You benchmark every post against best practices - except for, whose best practices and what benchmarks?

(5) You think it's marketing's job to write and edit the posts - so they look nice and professional, just like your brochures. I think that may work if you're a marketing agency, but what about a science lab? A construction company? A law firm? You get the idea.

(6) Your readers' comments are in lemon ink- they magically disappear or never appear when they're not exactly perfect testimonials. You'll need red cabbage to make them reappear, and frankly attracting that kind of attention is probably not what you wanted.

(7) You ask all your sales people to hit the blog daily to get good traffic - maybe this is a bit harsh because I know for a fact that you'd never, ever do that.

(8) You hire an agency to blog for you - this is not the same reason why it's not a good idea to have marketing blog about engineering. This is a bad idea because you embody the company and not a third party. Blogging can be maddeningly personal and doing this will awake the ghostwriting fairies.

(9) You're ill prepared for the Trojan Horse at your door - it seemed like a good idea when you thought it was a free gift from the gods, didn't it?

(10) You don't have it in your DNA - [thanks, George] it just doesn't add up when it's all said and done.

There will be communities without you, but this blogging thing is not a destination in the same way that you thought about your Web site. In fact, even for your Web site, you might consider what the user wants to do vs. the path you want to take him through, if there is a path at all.

Remember number 5 on this list, and that with a blog you're very much in the art of possibility mode vs. the confines of the limited universe of one-way thinking. What would happen if you took a seat in the midst of the audience? What would you see, feel, experience, learn?