Why should professionals blog? Should professionals blog? Can you be a professional and still blog? These are questions that I'm often asked by prospective clients.

Blog is such a pejorative, amateur and mostly, young word. These days new words appear quickly in dictionaries and blog is no exception. With an estimated 4 million blogs most are indeed teenage girls talking with other, mainly local, teenage girls, and this is what the dictionary definition stems from. However, the internet is a big place, used by individuals to talk to their friends, and businesses to expand their client base.

Businesses do indeed blog. Serious businesses. They understand what it means to communicate directly with clients. How valuable that two way direct communication is. How they can influence the thinking of people outside their company. How they can demonstrate their expertise. How they can even work with, collaborate, with 'outsiders' to harness the might of the network.

But, blog. Sure the web cognoscenti maybe impressed but the stuffy old geezer at the top of the tree who has his secretary send emails, will frown and think, "weirdo!" No, he won't 'get it.' He still can't send text messages from his mobile, thinks the kids who send messages at school from within their blazer pockets, because mobiles are banned in schools are freaks. He doesn't see that in 5 years time they're going to be recruited into his company—he still doesn't get it.

OK. Then don't use the word blog. Take all it's power, all it's RSS feeds and aggregation features, trackback, easy editing, updating from mobiles, take it and call it, taa-daa... A news page. A news page with community features.

Nobody need know, that secretly, sometimes very late at night, you are a blogger.