Why a blog makes sense to a business

I have been mulling over business cases for new media elements like blogs, wikis and podcasts on and off for a little while now. The difficulty with the new media space is that although it is a really exciting space, I tend to assume I will be speaking to businesspeople who don’t really know what a blog, or a wiki or a podcast is and are only really interested in a solution that will deliver a real benefit. We had a bust after the dotcom boom because most of the so-called solutions were really just vapourware with no real application in the business world.

This morning I came across one example that really shows how valuable blogs and blogging can be to a business. As I mentioned in my previous post, Spanning Partners, the creators of Spanning Sync, experienced a massive increase in their server load when they released their much anticipated software as a public beta. Spanning Partners put out a call for assistance with their increased load and their existing service provider, ServerBeach, responded:

As it turns out, one vendor did step in as the hero in this story. This afternoon I got a call from ServerBeach VP Robert Miggins, who said he had read about our need for a lot more processing power and wanted to work with us to help.
The result of our conversation is that we’ll be bringing some serious hardware online with more than enough capacity to reopen the public beta and take us through our launch.
Much credit is due to ServerBeachand to Robert himselfnot only for listening, but also for being willing to accommodate the unusual flexibility needs of a modern web startup.

This is why businesses should pay attention to blogs and particularly to their customers’ blogs. When you pay attention to what is being said about you in the blogosphere using tools like Technorati, you are better able to respond to those issues and do something about them. In this case, ServerBeach picked up the difficulties their client was having and took proactive action to help them out. The result is the kind of publicity only blogs can give because I and a number of other bloggers (Technorati is down for maintenance as I write this otherwise I’d tell you how many people have blogged about this) have blogged about this. You are reading this post and may blog about it and so on.

Tags: spanning partners, spanning sync, serverbeach, technorati, blogs, marketing