Business Blogs: A Practical Guide by Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington was released earlier this year. The first half of the book is a guide for would-be business bloggers, covering topics from platform selection to blog writing and the emergence of RSS readers and feeds. The second part of the book was developed from interviews with 70 bloggers, and reflects current blogging practices in small firms, large firms, non-profits. 

Although out in May, I just read the book - the authors were kind to send me a free downloadable copy as I was one of the people they interviewed in the book.  I had enjoyed the depth of questioning from Bill when he interviewed me, and this depth and insight is reflected in the book.  The interviews throw up motivations for blogging, practices, how corporate bloggers have gained, and some lessons for them.

Read this article by Amanda, one of the co-authors, an excerpt here that relects the tone of the book :

Blogging takes real time and a strong commitment. Many of the bloggers interviewed for Business Blogs: A Practical Guide did not set specific goals for their blogs - they had a desire and a means to communicate. Although many bloggers have chosen this approach, I strongly recommend setting goals for the blog. Is it to increase product awareness or garner new sales? Whatever the goal set, traffic metrics can provide a hard measure of the results; however, most bloggers gauge their blog's success on the relationships built and the connections made.

Blogs are at heart a social-networking medium. In a business world where marketers are expected to be in conversation with their customers, blogs provide an ideal medium.  It's a potential we are just beginning to tap.

Related to corporate blogging - I am just looking at a whitepaper on Corporate Blogging [pdf] from Backbone Media (John Cass and co). Available at their site are - an executive summary, survey and case studies overview, a section on crossing the corporate blogging digital divide, analysis and commentary of the survey results, case studies and lessons learned on how to build a successful corporate blog. Here's a diagram that that illustrates different processes companies are adopting to cross the corporate blogging cultural divide.

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