According to Valuepath, the value of blogs go beyond Social Networking. This post describes some future scenarios on how blogs can impact the value of firms. Here are some uses pointed in this article.
Blogs take advantage of the power of consumer word of mouth (WOM) and the power of social networks, well-established mechanisms in the practice of marketing.
Customer-initiated blogs provide a self-sustaining mechanism for consumer to consumer interaction and knowledge transfer.
Savvy marketers should be vigilant about reading consumer-initiated blogs in order to gain marketing insights (i.e. customer intelligence) and quicker feedback than could be provided via traditional tools
Blogs could be a useful to for managing customer dialogues
In sum, no company is going to stop customers from creating or reading blogs. So, firms might as well adjust their strategy to embrace this new consumer movement.
In addition to the many points described in this article there are a few intangibles in the employees blogging for companies. It puts a human face to a business entity. When I read Chris Pratley’s OneNote Blog, I had a much better appreciation on how the product came about and somehow felt connected to the product team.