Here’s a great contribution to the growing amount of information out there on the broad topic of why an organization should blog:
Imagine a room with tens of thousands of your customers talking about your company and your products. That’s one way to think about the blogging community (the blogosphere). The choice for companies is whether they want to be in that room or not. And increasingly, staying out is just too risky.
A perfect way to visualize it.
But there’s more:
It’s the interaction between blogs that makes them so interesting and influential. […] when linked together into massive intertwining communities they have the vibrancy and passion of a massive street market, with information, opinions and whispers exchanging hands at light speed.
And it’s no longer confined to techy chats. Conversations about every conceivable subject take place from caring for newborn twins, to political discussion or rants about brands and products. And as the quantity and quality of these conversations grows so does the blogosphere’s influence beyond the internet.
From a post on London marketing consultant James Cherkoff’s Modern Marketing blog, via Scoble.