When Business Blogging Goes Wrong

I recently wrote about the benefits of maintaining a blog for your business, and how it can help improve communication with your customers. Occasionally, the power to speak directly to your customer base can backfire, reflecting badly on your business and airing your dirty laundry for the world to see.

Blog tool provider Performancing provides us with an example of how business blogging can go horribly wrong. Performancing has been through a tumultuous period of late, having experienced a failed merger, the demise of their blog statistics service, and the departure of CEO Nick Wilson. All of these events were handled with grace and professionalism on their company blog.

But this week, things turned ugly. On Monday, new CEO Chris Garrett surprised Performancing users with the announcement that the company's advertising service, Performancing Partners, was closing down due to financing issues.

I'm sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn't going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn't going to happen at all.

On Tuesday, former CEO Wilson (who remains a shareholder in Performancing) published a blog post which questioned the closing of Partners.

I don't know what the communication problem between Performancing management is, but there appears to have been some decision making without the benefit of having all the facts.

By Wednesday, a new post appeared on the company blog from Nick Wilson, announcing his return to the helm of Performancing and the departure of Chris Garrett.

Im sad to say that Chris has decided he's better off working on his ongoing projects...I dont know about you guys, but even im a fed up with the constant news and announcements coming out of Performancing recently.

As a result of this very public flip-flopping, rumors abound about the eminent demise of Performancing. Returning CEO Nick Wilson seems determined to turn things around, and his return to the day-to-day management of the company should be a good thing. But his job would be a lot easier without the negative press generated by that unfortunate series of blog posts.

There are certainly many benefits of communicating with your customers via a blog, but it's important to remember that once you publish something, you really can't take it back. That's no reason to be scared away from business blogging, but it's important to use a little common sense before you post any big announcements. Make sure you've got your facts straight, and make sure your announcement won't come as a total surprise to your management and major shareholders.

Blogging can be a valuable tool, but like any tool, you can hurt yourself if you don't use it properly.