More on why corporate blogs fail

Among the valuable comments here following the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog post on the recent Forrester report on the sorry state of business-to-business blogging:

• I maintain and manage what I’ll call a “pr dispersal site” for a Fortune 500 company, and all efforts to “spice it up” with engaging content and an honest voice have been met with shrieks of terror from PR, marketing, corporate HQ, and the vast sea of go-betweens.
• ... A blog isn’t a pulpit, it’s a conversation. B2B marketers need to step back, understand this newer medium, and craft new strategies for successful implementation. Applying strategies from other media to the blog is like trying to induce a car to go using a buggy whip.
• Successful blogs have three things in common. 1) Personality. 2) They offer information that is valuable and/or entertaining to readers. 3) Time and resources are invested; Postings are not an afterthought. Most corporate blogs have none of the above. Like anything else, you get what you put into it.
• Most corporate blogs are strangled at birth by having to go through the legal department post by post.

Or, there is another explanation, however painful. And that is that blogging for the most part is a Gen. X/Y thing, and as long as the Boomers and their previous-century business practices remain in place, blogs will not have any real impact on how corporations -- and the public sector -- do business.