Blogging in Business by Ron Lichty

"...the real excitement here is not how much money business can make from blogging, but how dramatically blogging will reshape the world of business from top to bottom and create new sources of competitive advantage for firms that learn how to use this new medium intelligently," says David Kline in his AlwaysOn post The Voice of the Customer :: AO.

That's a pretty good description of what we were trying to get at, regarding not only blogs but community and collaboration software of all kinds, with our SDForum/SofTech event, Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions.

Kline notes it's not so different from the Web itself, where "...the real story of corporate America's embrace of the Internet in the last 10 years is not so much a tale of how much money has been made online, although that is considerable, but of how thoroughly almost every facet of global business has been altered by that embrace."

He goes on to make the case for the opportunity businesses have to leverage blogs for product definition -- to invite customers "to tell you directly, in their own often-rambling but always revealing words, exactly what they would like your new product to look like and why? All firms have to do is get their engineers and marketers blogging with their customers."

Kline is co-author of Blog!
How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture.

For more insight into the varied uses of blogging in business, visit David Kline's BlogRevolt.com