Matt Dickman (Techno//Marketer) is Vice President, Digital Marketing at Fleishman-Hillard in Cleveland, Ohio, and he says the answer to the question above depends on how you answer the following questions (Hint: the answer has to be ‘yes’):

1. Are you listening to your online community? – Are you spending a minimum of two hours a day searching, reading Google alerts or using a monitoring tool like Radian6?
2. Do you have something unique to say?
   – How will you differentiate yourself from other blogs and other
   companies? This could be your people, the information you publish or
   other forms of thought leadership.
3. Are you willing and able to say it? – Can you talk about your industry and are you willing to put it out there?
4. Are you willing to be challenged and criticized? – This goes with the turf. You have to be able to facilitate conversation in a respectful manner to grow a community.
5. Are you willing and able to dedicate the resources to succeed?
   – People always underestimate this one. A good rule for this to succeed
   is to have one person dedicated to the success of your strategy for a
   minimum of 4 hours per day (2 hours of which is listening and
   commenting). That is one half of a full time person’s week. Have
   staffing plans in place as you grow and start realizing your success.

Matt has even provided a decision tree to help his more visual clients with these questions.

The two hour committment referenced in #1 sounds like a lot but I really don’t know how a company could get the most out their blog without the primary blogger investing that much time. You can’t be a naturalist if you don’t go in the forrest. Thanks to David for finding and sharing.