One of the most common areas of confusion about blogs is in understanding how they're different from the other technology you might already be using on your website. If you've got someone saying "We're doing forums, isn't that just as good as a blog?" then you can use this section as a cheat sheet for responding to them.

How are blogs different from other web sites?

Blogs have a number of unique features that complement the other communications tools you use. We'll highlight the differences so you can see where blogs either work to improve your other systems, or where they can replace systems that don't work as well.

Send update notifications

Blogging tools let your audience be automatically updated via email or XML feeds whenever you've updated your website. Most sites require people to remember to visit, and then to figure out what's been updated since their last visit on their own, but blogs reduce the amount of effort required to keep up to date. Let's face it - lots of companies already have websites that offer information people could find useful, but those people aren't going to remember to come back. Blogs solve that problem by reminding them to return.

Publish XML feeds

This technology (often called RSS) notifies your readers of updates, but it also gives you the ultimate flexibility in reaching your audience. Feeds can be read or displayed on mobile devices like iPods, PDAs or phones; on an increasing number of consumer electronics devices such as Tivo; and an automatically be delivered to desktop and laptop computers, either in the web browser or on other websites. XML feeds reach your audience, wherever they are, with whatever information you choose to share. For more information, see "About Feeds".

A lobby, not a sidewalk

Blogs are a space online that you "own". This is an important idea: It means your company sets the tone of the conversation and the expectations about behavior. One simple way to think about this is to compare the difference between how people act on the sidewalk in front of an office building as opposed to the lobby inside the building. The lobby is an "owned" space, so disruptive behavior (or simply unwanted salespeople!) can be stopped and prevented from participating in the conversation. In the same way, blogs can make sure a conversation online is productive and stays on topic while still being welcoming.

Feedback through comments and links

When the internet was first gaining popularity among business users, there was a lot of talk about companies being able to take advantage of rich interactivity to find out the sentiments and suggestions of their customers. Blogging actually helps you take advantage of that potential by building in simple tools that let you get comments and feedback from your audience. That feedback can be published on your site, collected through email, or displayed using a system called TrackBack (see "About TrackBack") that shows when another blogger has linked to your site. This kind of direct, personal feedback used to be expensive to collect, but with blogging it's a natural part of participating in the community.

Your audience is happy because they can respond, and you're happy because you're collecting valuable feedback without painful or expensive surveys or polls.

Comparisons to other online community tools

Alright, so blogs have unique features - but so do forums and wikis and other community tools. How can you distinguish between all this stuff?

Blogs vs. regular websites

Blogs are more dynamic than traditional websites, and are more likely to have a human voice. That means readers form a tighter connection with the blog and the company that publishes it. Blogging promises an ongoing relationship, without requiring a lot of investment or obligation on your part. A static "brochure" website doesn't always indicate that there are real people on the other end who care about customers and their needs.

Blogs vs. email

Email is a fantastic tool for updating customers or members of your team, but these days most people feel frustrated that their inbox is just another burden to deal with. And problems with junk or spam email make delivery unreliable at best, and frequently impossible.

Blogs complement email by being more permanent and reliable, less demanding or intrusive for readers, and able to reach a wider audience. Let's take a look at a common scenario that shows the problem with email, and how blogs can help.

A group email message is sent to 10 recipients, and 8 of them get the update with the information they needed. Two people on your team didn't really feel the message was relevant to them, so they just ignored it, though it contributed to the clutter in their inboxes.

Worse, two other team members who wanted the message weren't included in the first place. By the time the next project rolls around, they may not remember what this update was about, but they will definitely remember that they weren't included on the message. And then those first recipients of the message start sending "Reply All" emails, making the problem even worse.

Pretty soon, you've got people sending the "Why the hell was I copied on this message?" and "Get me off this list!" emails, and you're starting to dread even opening your inbox.

A blog post with the same update information could be viewed by everybody on the team at their leisure, without cluttering up their inboxes. Comments or feedback can be collected even from people who weren't included as recipients of the original message. And all the information and comments are stored permanently so that you can refer to them for your next project.

The benefits of blogs vs. email aren't just limited to project teams inside your company.

For marketers, using blogs to share a message eliminates concerns about opt-in and privacy. Subscribing to blogs or XML feeds automatically verifies a reader's interest in the content, and makes it easy to send new messages without having to learn new technology or tools.

In any organization, blogs can be updated by email, making it easy to build blogs into your existing email workflow. And you can send out blog content by email to people who are used to getting information in their inbox and don't want to learn anything new.

Blogs vs. traditional content management systems

Most content management systems are designed from a technology or process perspective, instead of from the perspectives of the people who will be using them. Though CMS vendors describe advanced workflow capabilities or permissions as benefits of the system, most regular users see those "features" as a pain, and they avoid them like the plague.

Worse, to deploy a CMS, you often have to have your people trained, and if the IT or IS department sends them away for a day of training, they'll come back still being unwilling to use the system, only now they'll be resentful for having their time wasted, as well. On the other hand, blogs are easy (and fun) enough to use that people do lots of blogging in their free time - we still haven't seen anyone who uses an enterprise CMS in their free time.

Despite being much simpler for regular people to use, blogs offer most of the benefits of more expensive traditional content management systems:

• You can easily output your content through templates in multiple formats.
• The system manages archiving, organization, categorization, and publishing automatically.
• You can set permissions over who can create or edit content.
• Blogs can integrate with your existing website and other applications.

And with blogging, you can probably take advantage of expertise that your team already has: If your organization employs 100 people or more, you already have people on staff that have experience in blogging. Blogging tools tend to be more flexible than older CMSes, making it easy for even those with no technical savvy to change the output and design of your published pages.

Blogs vs. forums or bulletin boards

Forums and bulletin boards have traditionally been extremely difficult to navigate, and often allow almost anyone to start a conversation. It's a strange tradition - you wouldn't let random people outside your company write whatever they want on your company newsletter, but that seems normal with forums. As a result, the burden of managing these community is pretty high; You end up either playing forum police, always on the lookout for bad behavior, or your forum becomes a haven for those who have a lot of time on their hands.

In most forum software, the tools for encouraging good behavior are poor or non-existent, and the discussion tends to fall to the lowest common denominator. As we mentioned, except in the best-maintained forums, the person with the most time on his hands tend to dominate the conversation. Somehow, successful and busy professionals are never the people with tons of free time on their hands. A disgruntled customer with an axe to grind or a competitor using a fake name can turn a forum into an ongoing maintenance nightmare.

With a blog, your company is in charge and controls the conversation in a way that forums just don't allow. Instead of anyone being able to create their own thread or conversation, you can limit posting to authorized staff on your team. You also don't have to worry about content appearing on your site without your approval - it's easy to set comments on your blog to only be published after you've approved them. So there's no scramble to go back and clean up a conversation that's gone off the rails and polluted your website.

Blogs vs. wikis

If you've heard of wikis, congratulations - you're on the cutting edge in terms of online technology systems. Wikis are a part of a newer breed of tools designed to allow anyone in an organization to collaboratively edit or revise documents stored in a central repository, and many organizations find wikis are a good complement to blogs. To date, business use of wikis have been limited, because most of the tools are simply too hard regular people to use. As with most technology, though, it's getting easier as more people try to figure wikis out, and the ease of creating documents with a wiki makes the tool a good match for the simple publishing of blogs.

The biggest distinction between blogs and wikis is that wikis are designed to create a single collaborative result, the sum total of the efforts of everyone who can view that web page. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Wikipedia, which is trying to use everyone on the Internet to create the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever made. But sometimes you want to share some information and be the owner of that information. Blogs are perfect for these situations: They only allow people to respond or react to the information you've shared, but they can't modify it themselves.

If you're considering a wiki, you'll want to pair it with a blog to get the most out of it. Use the blog to post information about updates on the wiki or to collect comments from your community about content on the wiki.

Blogs vs. chat

Chat systems such as instant messenger applications have exploded in popularity in recent years. They share some common traits with blogs, including an immediacy and simplicity of use, and blogs share the same ability to let people communicate in a human voice. But most instant messenger chats tend to disappear as soon as they end, making it impossible to archive, search, or recall a conversation without buying additional expensive software.

Fortunately, it's possible to connect chat and blogs, and to use a chat interface to create or suggest new content for a blog. That way, your blog can collect and store the best information that your team is sharing through chat systems right now.

Next: The Benefits of Blogging for Media Organizations