So, if those two darlings are falling from favour, what of that once-fashionable online pursuit, blogging? Is it worth your time and effort if Facebook and its ilk are where it’s at?

Inevitably, the answer is, “It depends.” If you are a consumer brand looking to engage directly with your market, Facebook is increasingly the medium of choice. For example, Procter and Gamble is very pro Facebook as a way to interact with customers.

However, for other types of business, and for other business purposes, blogging still has many strengths. Yes, gone are the days when every company expected to attract a mass of bloggers and an online community Boing Boing would be proud of. However, here are just some of the things a blog is great for:

• Making your business ‘transparent’. Customers increasingly expect their suppliers to be open, honest and accountable. Failings are tolerated, provided that they are owned up to and rectified (quickly). Your blog can be a great way of showing what’s really going on in your office and winning some customer loyalty. Famously, Microsoft employee Robert Scoble almost singlehandedly changed perceptions of his company for the better through his Scobleizer blog, which revealed that inside the software monolith was a bunch of people making the same mistakes as everyone else.

• Getting your message out clearly. As we have blogged previously, Bob Lutz, vice chairman at embattled General Motors, became committed to blogging to ensure that GM’s real news and opinion was reaching its customers. Other organisations similarly in the firing line can find it very helpful to create their own news channel in this way, as British Airways is presently doing. However, even for companies that aren’t in the crosshairs, this can be a great way of supplementing and adding depth to the press coverage you are getting.

• Refining your thinking. Nothing sharpens your thoughts more than having to write them down. Making regular blog postings about your business and industry can help you focus on issues and think of new ways to tackle them. This can be particularly useful for professional service or advisory firms, as opinion is their stock in trade. However, anyone who lives by their wits in business stands to benefit from this discipline.

If you want to start blogging or improve what you already do, here are our top tips for better blogging.

• What do you want the blog to achieve?
• Who is your target audience?
• What sort of content and usage is therefore appropriate?

Here are eight tips to keep your blog fresh for 2010:

1. Establish clear goals – It is important to determine goals for the company blog as you would for any other communications channel. For example, you might want to provide updates on company news, offer commentary on industry trends, or share educational and how-to content.

2. Provide a mix of content – To ensure readers keep returning you must provide a good mix of interesting and topical content. Remember, if you want to be thought of as an industry expert, act like one: instead of replicating articles from other sites, provide your own comment and analysis before linking to the articles in question. By all means, use available corporate content, such as your company press releases, but preface these with comment or elaboration to provide the reader with additional value. However, know where the line is between blogging and selling: if you force-feed your audience with too much sales-speak you will quickly drive people away.

3. Schedule time to blog regularly – If the weekend newspaper replicated old articles, or failed to appear regularly, you would seriously consider whether to buy it again. Think of your blog as a similar news stream and ensure the content is kept fresh and relevant. Whether you decide to blog daily, weekly or fortnightly, have a schedule in place and stick to it. That said, make your approach flexible enough to cover hot topics or breaking news when it matters.

4. Use a mixture of authors – Having multiple blog authors offers several benefits. It lessens the burden on any one person to provide posts and makes a virtue of diversity, showcasing different writing styles and ideas, which in turn creates better search-optimised content. However, be selective when approaching team members as potential bloggers. Not everyone may be suited to the task, so seek out the natural written communicators.

5. Encourage open dialogue – A blog should become an online forum and readers need to be encouraged to comment and share their views.  Always respond to comments where appropriate and pose questions that will open lines of communication. For example, British Airways subsidiary Open Skies posts all visitor comments, good and bad, on its blog.

6. Participate in conversations on other blogs within your industry – Participating in other blogs will help establish credibility and, if you comment as an expert, will bring more readers to your blog. If you are a professional service firm ensure you are commenting on blogs within your clients’ industries; not only can this increase your following but it can also attract potential new clients to your website.

7. Make your blog, and its content, easy to find – Ensure that you link prominently from your website to your blog and optimise your content as you would on your website. By using keywords in your blog that are not providing the desired return on your website you can target gaps in your website SEO strategy and make your content work harder for you. Embrace social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and use these as ways of notifying followers of new blog content.

8. Keep going – A blog following takes time and effort to build, but with good planning and quality content your efforts will be rewarded.

However, many firms are holding back from taking the plunge, with three common reasons being:

• Perceived lack of relevance – a feeling that social media is just for teenagers (actually, only a minority of Twitter users are in their teens)
• Fear of surrendering control – embracing social media does indeed require a shift from the old ‘command and control’ approach to communications, as it enables and encourages anyone to publicly air their views about a business
• Lack of knowledge – technology moves pretty fast, and not everyone knows where to start

There’s no universal prescription when it comes to social media- what’s right for one business might be entirely wrong for another. However, it’s helpful to see some of the different approaches used by companies around the world. Perusing their ideas might help you find the right approach for you.

Our 2009 ‘Taking the Brave Pills’ Gold Award, if it existed, would go to the fearless marketers behind Skittles. They’ve turned their entire website into a mammoth social media forum. Virtually all the content is generated by others – comments are hoovered-up from Twitter, pics are the handiwork of anyone with a Flickr account and video comes from YouTube. With swearing and all sorts permitted, it flies in the face of conventional ideas of marketing, but it’s definitely a bold way to show a brand in touch with its fans.

Our Silver Award would go to First Direct, the UK online bank. Their new social media site firstdirectlive isn’t quite as ‘full immersion’ as Skittles in its approach, but it displays negative feedback alongside the positive. The bank is clearly fairly confident about its customer service and this is an eye-catching but fairly pragmatic way to turn customers into ambassadors. Marketing director Lisa Wood explains the bank’s thinking to E-consultancy here.

Among our clients, Cessna and KDS have shown how social media can be adopted selectively to good effect. Cessna recently launched Fly_Cessna, using the established Twitter infrastructure to reach out to customers and fans. It’s also set up its own Cessna channel on YouTube. Similarly, KDS’s YouTube channel is positively bursting with content about its travel and expense management systems, while its photo library is available for download from Flickr. London Executive Aviation is also on Twitter at LondonExecutive and on YouTube here.

For those who want to dip a toe in the water, Twitter is a good place to start. Mike Steltzner posted on Copyblogger a great primer on tweeting for business and the tools that help.

Come on in – the water’s lovely!