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Over the past couple of years, we all know the use of blogs on the Internet has skyrocketed. People have been creating personal web logs to discuss everything from politics, to technology, to what their favorite reality show contestant did last night. Until the past year, blogs have generally (with a few notable exceptions) been personal in nature.

That mindset is what has kept many businesses away from blogging. Executives seemed to think it was a fad, or not business-minded enough for users within their enterprise. That has really started to change as more and more businesses are starting to incorporate blogging within their own walls.

What is a blog?

In order to understand why business blogs are getting traction, you have to realize what blogs are good at. At its most basic definition a blog is defined by Wikipedia as "a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order." Older posts scroll down, and are eventually archived. Each content entry has its own permanent page link. This link never changes, and allows people to link to and find that content in the future.

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There is also generally a comments section that allows readers the ability to give feedback and engage in discussions around the content that is posted. This allows the author to have two-way conversations with his or her readers. This simple mechanism really helps define a blog and make it the most useful.

How does business benefit?

In a business sense, the commenting ability can be used in various ways. The first is to allow employees to blog to the public. An executive or a developer could post news and information about the company in an honest an open manner. This is a direct conduit to the customer. The individual can post information and then discuss its ramifications with real end-users quickly and fairly efficiently. Large companies like Adobe, Microsoft and IBM do this all the time.

As an example in the Lotus world, Mary Beth Raven, lead product designer for Lotus Notes 8, has posted numerous times about the upcoming GUI re-design for Lotus Notes 8. She's asked questions and gotten feedback that has directly impacted the development of the product. Before blogs, it would have been much harder for Mary Beth to get that kind of interaction and feedback from the community so quickly, much less actually get that feedback in time to make changes to an upcoming product.

Internalizing your blogs

Another way the commenting can be useful is for internal blogs. For example, you could have a project leader use a blog to post updates and gain feedback on a current project. It not only allows interaction, but also serves as a record of the progress made along the way. It doesn't have to be limited to a project leader either, it can be a group blog where all members of the team have access to post. (See screen shot below.)

Blogs are also well suited as a news conduit. You could use internal blogs from HR to make announcements to employees, or Marketing could post the latest company news and information about upcoming events. You could even use the RSS capabilities included in blogs to syndicate the content to employee's newsreaders.

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