An open and honest public blog, written by an authoritative voice from within your company, allows your business to create a different type of experience between you and your customers: it allow  you to create legitimate conversations that simply weren’t possible before online blogging. Blogging means your company will no longer need to depend on expensive focus groups, feedback forms, e-mail, and other time-consuming and tedious methods used for gaining feedback.

If you want to know why your latest product isn’t selling, you can ask your customers on your blog; they’ll tell you the truth. If an executive was recently fired for a corporate scandal, you can tackle the issue on your blog in an open manner. Such honesty makes an impression with your customers, which will be more real than almost any media article on the subject. Even more important is that any person who reads your blog is doing so by choice—he or she came to your blog to see what you have to say. Blogs are just about the only marketing tool for which this holds true.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is looking at blogs as just another way to get out the same old marketing message. Nobody wants to read that kind of thing on a blog. Blogging is really about three things:

• Information Telling your customers what you’re doing and finding out what they are thinking.
• Relationships Building a solid base of positive experiences with your customers that changes them from plain-old consumers to evangelists for your company and products.
• Knowledge management Having the vast stores of knowledge within your company available to the right people at the right time.

Without blogs, company messages can get so filtered by public relations or the media that CEOs and other senior management have decided to talk directly with customers—whether it be in the company’s stores, on the company’s airplanes, or at special events set up specifically for communicating with customers. The value of direct customer feedback is obvious, and blogs provide that on a global scale.

Blogs are effectively a form of free advertising that your customers are begging for. Blogs are easy to track, provide a means to generate and measure buzz, and allow you to create positive experiences, and ultimately customer evangelists, simply by being real.

You can also use blogging for exciting internal purposes—to help employees generate and try out new ideas, involve and empower employees, and improve your ability to communicate internally. Whether you’re a global Fortune 100 company or a mom-n-pop plumbing supply retailer, internal blogs can help you stay organized and external blogs can change the way people relate to your business.