One caveat: Just make sure it’s the kind that’s dialogue-minded and not a one-way monologue.
If it’s the latter you’re wasting your time, for the simple reason that you’ll end up talking to yourself in an empty room. You’ll be reduced to yakking into a dead phone. So don’t. Instead, do everything you can to make your blog a true dialogue, which is what people want and need. Enable and encourage visitors to your site (read: shoppers, customers, prospects, suspects, etc.) to converse with you. This means responding, no holds-barred, to all the questions they ask – not just the ones you feel like answering. Same as you would if you were in a one-on-one, face-to-face conversation. You wouldn’t blow off a legitimate question there, would you?
Of course, if the answer to a question would put you in competitive jeopardy, such as revealing future products, etc., discretion is the better part of candor. Still, make this clear immediately, and satisfy the spirit of the question nonetheless.
I’m seeing more and more company blogs that bear a suspicious and tiresome resemblance to the rest of the web site surrounding it: self-serving, feel-good propaganda with the writer’s bosses, not the reader, foremost in mind. This is worse than self-serving, it’s self-defeating. Ask yourself: is this a blog you would consider a must-read if you were on the other side of the screen? That’s the test. Yes, it’s that simple.
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