Jeff Nolan from SAP Ventures has a superb comment on why companies should pay attention to blogs and how they should handle them. There's a little story behind, starting from Jack's challenging the effectiveness of online social networks and arguing that people are tired to get spam messages of joining their social networks from people whom they do not know. As such he picked up Linkedin (which is perhaps the most business-like social network from US), created a fake account and sent out invitations to his more than 1000 contacts. Jeff published the whole story on his blog. After 2-3 weeks the results proved his points, but this is not as important as the fact that the Linkedin's CEO himself contacted Jeff via his blog acknolwedging that they're aware of the problems and they're trying to fix it.

The morale of the story, besides Reid Hoffman's leadership lesson (Linkedin CEO) of the way he treated the whole matter, emphasizes that blogs started to represent a terrific medium for getting valuable feedback from customers in real time as well as communicating the corporate strategy and vision properly.