The Butt Ugly Weblog

--Eero, 02-Jun-2006

Indeedy :-). But still, even bad content would probably drive people to the site, if for no other reason than to laugh at you.

--JanneJalkanen, 02-Jun-2006

I'd use corporate blogs carefully as a means to drive traffic to corp sites. Should the content suck, as it is too often the case both with corporate blogs and corporate static content (as both are too often seen as usual one-way marketing bs outlets), the informed, loud and connected visitor will laugh at you, and his friends, and his friends' friends, and ... they will be coming back to check what new content you have published they can laugh at still even more while you wonder what the heck just hit keeps on hitting your eroding public image among the informed, loud and connected, who still cannot understand why you have not learned anything

--Sami O, 04-Jun-2006

Well, yes, the quality of the traffic you get certainly changes according to how crap you are.

But if you're already publishing quality products, it should not be too hard to get together a few Cat III bloggers. If your products already suck, then I don't know how much good your bloggers can spin on the matter.

--JanneJalkanen, 04-Jun-2006

Talking in an old thread here. I think that the "quality" may not be the unique part of blogging.

But "opinions" might be. (Here I interpret the concept of expressing opinion very widely: linking to another site means "voting for it", in some sense. The vote is inflected emotionally by the link text -- cf. "miserable failure" at Google Search.)

The corporation can express their opinion in other ways, as well. Like: banning criticism of their product in blog comments, trying to stop other bloggers from writing about them, etc.

Moving from "the silent, strong type" to "talkative, opinionated" is difficult. Finding the limits of one's style, one's discourse must be a process of trial and error. With blogging, those errors are always public. Scary.

Johnnie Moore writes a lot of fine things about Enterprises that begin blogging. http://johnniemoore.com/

--OlleJonsson, 14-Jun-2006

Thanks for the link! Especially for Finns the transition is difficult... But on the other hand, not everyone needs to be a blogger. Only those who have the natural aptitude for it - and it's not even that hard to find those people. They tend to announce themselves quite readily. ;-)

--JanneJalkanen, 14-Jun-2006