If you think about it for a while, you’ll see it’s entirely true: companies that have a blog are friendly and feel closer. They care about your opinion and want you to know more. They share information with you, their customer or fan, and want to know about your opinions and input about their company and services.

In the last few months (to about a year and a half) we’ve seen the escalation of the corporate blog phenomenon (something I’ve been following and working on). Companies are finaly realizing that a good way to reach their target market (and to actually expand it) is by getting closer through the web: both speaking and listening.

I don’t really want to sound like a blog evangelist (I hate the word) but it is a fact that blogs are about building relationships, just like marketing is. Blogs get you closer to the people who listen to what you have to say, because they’re about personal content, something people care about. People who are read (like you are right now) build a “relationship” to the author of a post (often too, the creator of a product): because they’re interested, because they share an opinion, because they disagree, because they want the other end to listen to them too.

This is why blogging in businesses is important. If your company creates a good product but doesn’t listen to feedback or talk about the “how” and “why”, I’ll easily take your neighbours’s that does. Because if your neighbour cares about making me feel special when giving me insight into a product and allowing me to comment on it, that means my chances of actually seeing that product reflect my real needs are greater - and that’s a clear win for both parties.

People value honesty and straight-forwardness. Blogging is about reality, about giving people what they want to know, not what they want to hear in order to be happy. It’s about a conversation between you who create a product, and anyone else that’s a potential customer. If you want me listening to what you have to offer, start a blog. Wake up and smell the web 2.0.