Corporate Blogging: More Than Idle Chatter. Do it--and do it as if you mean it.

February 1, 2008

With 100 million blogs now online, you may feel as though the last thing your website or the world needs is another one. But if you don't have a blog, you might want to reconsider. That's because Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), the great arbiter of Web success, has a particular love for blogs.

When compiling its vaunted rankings, the search engine appears to favor websites that are updated frequently and are linked to by other webpages. Given these criteria, blogs have an outsize influence on the results. And blogs are more than a way to game Google. A surprising 66 percent of North American consumers trust blogs as a source of product information, according to a 2007 survey by Nielsen.

By: Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy

Full Story: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080201/more-than-idle-chatter.html