Who's afraid of the big bad blog?

Johnnie Moore links to Robert Scoble musing on big businesses' reluctance to adopt blogging. Scoble relates the Kryptonite story as an example of how easily a story spread by "word-of-mouth" in the blogosphere can damage a brand. The Kryptonite folks have offered a solution, but the penetration of their message has been much lower.

Scoble posits that this may be, at least in part, due to their lack of a blogging culture and hence lack of access to the blogosphere to tell an anti-story. As Scoble observes crisis management isn't the only reason corporate culture would do well to adopt blogging.

His reasons distill down to maintaining a relationship—a relationship between customers and a brand. How do we maintain relationships? By remembering Roger Lewin and Birute Regine's message in The Soul at Work that people matter:

…to develop caring and connected relationships is to become genuinely interested in other people's stories… Engaging people's stories deepens the conversation and is a way of instigating the delicate work of building trust in an organisation.

Why then are weblogs effective at building relationships? I think it is because weblogs can tell stories more effectively than other electronic media. As Scoble points out:

Hey, Microsoft has had "mswish@microsoft.com" for a long time. Even when I was a customer of Microsoft's, I'd never send anything to that address. Why? I never thought anyone was listening.

Like Larry Prusak said "I never hear stories through e-mail. I hear them through talking to people." I wonder whether Larry can hear stories through weblogs? I think I can.

Update: Kryptonite argues its case (via Steve Rubel).