Corporate America Adopts Blogging

More Corporations Encouraging And Using Internet Journals

(AP)  In addition to Lutz, other notable executives who pen public blogs include Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of the global PR firm Edelman and Craig Newmark, founder of the online swap meet Craigslist.org.

"I think that in two years ... we will look back and laugh that we treated this as such a big deal," said Blackshaw, who said it's inevitable that companies will adapt to the consumer-driven atmosphere of the Web.

Done well, corporate blogs can create good word-of-mouth among consumers who aren't reading business pages or thumbing through trade magazines.

The FastLane Blog gets between 150,000 and 200,000 unique visits a month, and Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz's blog gets 300,000 visits.

But bad blogging can easily backfire. Readers will pick up insincerity instantly.

"Don't go toward fake blogs. Don't launch character blogs. Use a blog for what it's for, transparency," said Steve Rubel, vice president of client services at CooperKatz & Co., a New York PR firm.

Rubel follows blog news on his blog, Micro Persuasion, and runs his company's unit of the same name, advising clients on blogging and on podcasting, the suddenly fashionable creation of downloadable person-to-person broadcasts.

He and other PR professionals can rattle off blogs gone wrong — usually "fake blogs" that stir up the ire of bloggers by hiding the fact that they are really ad campaigns, such as one McDonald's posted in advance of a Super Bowl campaign about a Lincoln-shaped french fry.