If a company doesn't have a blog or a similar hub for fresh, engaging content, they're missing out on one of the best ways to engage existing customers and to get new customers through the power of advocacy and SEO. Notice that I say "a blog or similar hub" since "blog" may be off-putting to convincing your colleagues and it may not work with customers.

So why don't we see more company blogs? Here are some of the reasons I hear most often.

1. 'What's the point, where's the return?'
The return on investment for a blog is certainly hard to prove in a monetary sense. But a big part of the business case is within SEO -- where I think a blog is now essential to effective SEO, particularly now Google uses signals from social networks to rank pages.

Key business benefits of a blog to build into the business case are:

• It provides a hub, a focus for all your online communications
• It can help build and re-position your brand
• It creates a viral effect through social sharing
• Blog platforms are relatively cheap to run

2. 'We don't have enough to say.
The counter argument is that you probably do have enough to say for an e-newsletter or through press releases. These can be repurposed for the blog. You HAVE to find enough to say to keep followers on social networks engaged and the blog provides a hub for this.

3. 'People will say bad things about us.'
True, but detractors will say the same about you elsewhere where it's less easy for you to manage and comment.

Of course you can moderate, with a commenting policy saying what's in and out. So only posts you authorise go up -- I think that's often not understood.

4. A blog sounds too techie.
This is a fair comment -- I think blogs are possibly associated with tech site or personal blogs rather than companies.

In that case, you could position it as a customer magazine - some blogs even have the e-Newsletter built into them. This will sit better with corporate communications teams in a larger organisation.

5. 'We can't afford it.'
This is an easy one to argue against. Many of the blog systems are open source or require a small outlay for a theme. Yes, you will need a designer to update the skin, but total cost could be £100's rather than £ 1000's. The real cost is the staff time to edit it or to outsource this.

6. 'The senior managers don't get it -- the risks outweigh the benefits for them.'
We've seen there are many objections, so it's easy to let all of these outweigh the benefits, particularly when a blog is somewhat a leap of faith -- the benefits in ROI can't be established in advance, but the same is true for an e-newsletter, Facebook or Twitter presence and they seem to be authorised.