Marketing people in businesses still don’t understand blogging, it seems. And if these people don’t understand it, what hope is there for the rest of a company which is not so marketing oriented.

New data suggests that while 85% of marketing staff agree that the web helps a company hit sales targets, only 5% of these people are actually blogging. In other words marketing people agree with the theory that the Internet is valuable to their business, but appear to be doing little practical to back up their theoretical view.

A while ago I was speaking at a business meeting and I asked the audience if they had done any blogging. Only one person in the audience admitted they had been blogging. However, the hapless businessman said, “I tried blogging once but it didn’t work”. That’s a bit like moving into a new town, taking a small classified advert out in the local newspaper and expecting hordes of people to come rushing to your door.

But the problem with blogging for most people is the name, the very word blogging. It implies you need technical skills, that you ought to understand some aspects of computer programming and that you should be a bit “geeky”. I was at a business meeting yesterday where a chap came up to me during the breaks and said he couldn’t take up blogging as he wasn’t very technically minded. I asked if he could fill in an online form, he said “yes”, so I told him if he could do that he could write a blog.

But the word blogging had made him think it was complex. So how can we get business people to benefit from blogging? Call it something else – article writing, content production, whatever. Once business people realise that blogging is simply typing they may find it more attractive. All the time blogging has a sense of technological mystery around it, few companies will actively take it up.