blogging | Social Signal

Asked on LinkedIn: "Blogs are a very good tool for consumers to evaluate prospective product or service providers. However, how can a business use blogs to its commercial advantage (i.e. gain valuable insight into customer behavior and satisfaction levels) while minimizing the risk of being unduly smeared by a minority of disgruntled customers or even competitor attacks?"

When you're talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility... but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations - in fact, of institutional communications generally - and you have a challenge.

These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can't.

Some blog comments are easy to deal with. They praise you to the heavens, share a related story or gently offer a different perspective... that is, they're a positive part of the conversation. You thank, you respond (or they're comment spam, in which case you report them to Mollom or Akismet and then delete) and the circle of life continues.

But other comments are hard. They get your back up. They seem to question not just your argument but your integrity. The more you read them, the clearer it becomes that they were written by evil, evil people. And with your fight-or-flight mechanism firmly in gear, you write a blistering reply...

I'm writing this blog post with the assistance of Zemanta, a web service that claims to enrich your blog posts and emails by inserting links, related pictures, articles and tags. I thought I'd take it for a spin to see how it works here on SocialSignal.com.