Of course, creating a successful business involves more than having great teams, great ideas, great products, and increased visibility— but if your business could do only these four things right, you’d be off to a good start. The real question is how blogging can augment or help in each of these areas.

Ideas

Good ideas are always hard to come by. Several adventurous companies have begun blogging for new product ideas, assuming that their users know what they want better than the companies do. GM’s FastLane blog (http://fastlane.gmblogs .com) is a great example of this: GM runs new concepts by readers at the site, inviting them to comment. By providing a space for customers to interact, you can be assured that they will interact. As a company, you need to be ready for the feedback that will come as a result.

Products

Traditional product development leverages a roomful of customers to make decisions for a world full of people. The end result is a series of focus group insights that have no real-world applications. Blogging affords the opportunity to ask the world of customers about what they actually want.

Visibility

Most traditional visibility campaigns are single events that rarely go beyond the customer’s first experience. Even the best viral campaigns that encourage customers to spread the word are really just single-interaction events. Blogs let your readers decide how and when to interact with you. Not only do they give customers control over the relationship, but they encourage customers to continue to engage with you over time, thus providing a multitude of experiences they can subsequently share with friends and associates. Blogs encourage customers to become participants and participants to become evangelists. And they encourage everyone to come together as a community.

Teamwork

By creating opportunities for your staff members to communicate effectively, you create a space for more meaningful interactions. Blogs come in where other types of communication fail. It’s been said that e-mail is where information goes to die. When was the last time you actually looked at a message you’d archived awhile back, “just in case”? Blogs are where living information resides. People in your company can find others with similar interests by searching topics that other internal bloggers have considered. Creating ad-hoc connections based on content that is created and owned by internal bloggers is a great way to keep your teams well oiled, motivated, and in touch with people with similar passions across your organization. Think about the efficiencies that could be gained for the whole company if these experts had an easy way to exchange and archive ideas.