David Kline posed a very good question in our comments a couple of days ago. He asked,

“Do you think there’s any relationship between a company’s decision to start (or to encourage) blogging and its market performance? Or its confidence level in traditional PR initiatives?”

Anchorage Daily News has one answer:

“When European competitor Airbus edged Boeing in passenger plane sales last year, the U.S. aircraft manufacturer decided to take its pitch to a growing audience in a mostly uncorporate space: the blogosphere.” (Boeing blog here)

I think a similar view could be taken for General Motors - which suffers from bad press and bad numbers these days. Its Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz wrote on his blog back in March, “The media coverage on the auto industry of late has done much to paint an ugly portrait of General Motors.” That post has 102 comments at the last count.

So there are two examples which perhaps imply that the negative considerations can have something to do with the decision to blog. But I do think there many positive reasons too - some of which we list on our ‘About Blogs” page.

The best reason to get into blogging is to get your feet wet and understand what it’s all about. Bloggers can be saying things good and bad about you - but you get credit for being one of them. You get a feel for what the ‘people’ are saying and the language they are using- not the flunkies inside the walls of your corporate castle. Also, if you have your own blog, comments come directly to you, where you can respond to them, instead of hiding below the radar screen on unseen blogs, until suddenly they emerge and ambush you unawares.

I would suggest a prime positive example can be provided by Sun Microsystems. It’s a company that blogs from top to bottom. Employees interview senior managers and podcast it. It’s a fantastic form of grass roots knowlege management. Outsiders read Johnathan Schwartz’s blog to see what he’s thinking. The company is heading for open source, open communications. That’s a good reason to blog.

P.S. Take a look at David Kline’s reasons why he blogs.. He begins, “When I was a war correspondent, I didn’t need to carry a gun in order to write more or less intelligently about what I saw. …”