Blog is the new black.

Businesses, mine included, labor under the assumption that we are in charge of public dialog about our companies. But we are not and never have been. And that is why corporate participation in social media — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, forums — is so vital to a company’s well-being. It allows us to participate in the dialog in a way that’s transparent to our customers. We can post to our blogs representing our company. We can answer a challenge to our customer service publicly and prove our willingness to correct the problem. We can speak as one person to another with our customers, instead of as a distant corporate entity.