Blogging has been heralded, among other things, as a very inexpensive way to do buzz marketing. Companies, especially smaller businesses, have found blogging to be indeed helpful with reaching out to consumers. And what’s best is that this can be done with minimal cost. You don’t have to hire PR professionals or advertising agencies just to get the word out. Usually, it’s the people who will do that for you.

However, blogging does have its costs, especially in a business environment. It’s not always a rosy picture, I tell you. And I speak from experience.

For one, blogging can be very distracting and time-consuming. Most small companies that engage in marketing through blogs do so by having some of their employees write about their products and services. Sometimes, it’s the CEO him/herself who blogs about the company and its products and services. However, in many cases, blogging can be very time consuming and could eat up time that could have otherwise been used for more productive purposes.

And if your employees end up just blogging all day, won’t that be a waste of precious dollars you pay for their salary. I guess it’s okay if a person’s job directly involves blogging. But what if he’s your lead developer, and your project suffers months of backlog because he can’t focus on work?

Then what about PR nightmares? Blogs have been known to cause PR problems to some companies, particularly when bloggers write about problems and failures of your products or services. Remember the Kryptonite incident? It’s not exactly about blogging, but new media helped spread the word that Kryptonite locks are vulnerable to hacking with a simple ball point pen. What about the exploding Dell computers? What about overheating MacBook Pros and iBook batteries?

Sometimes it takes more than just blogging to counter the negative PR effects of these. Of course, users are just reporting their opinions, and they have every right to (especially if your product is really problematic). But the cost of product recalls and replacements and having to issue media releases to get information out would probably be huge. What about lost business and tarnished company reputations?

And then of course there’s the leakage of proprietary information. How often have trade secrets been revealed on blogs? More often than not, company insiders are involved. Maybe someone in your organization is blogging anonymously about your top secret plans. Or maybe someone is feeding information to other external blogs.

The cost of blogging for businesses doesn’t only involve the internal matters like installing blog software and running/renting a server. Blogs and bloggers are a highly independent form of media, and chances are you cannot really influence what information is published, especially from the outside.

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