How many times have you heard this, "Sounds good, but how does it scale?" or as Fred Wilson said:

In the world of technology, geeks, and hackers, saying something doesn't scale is one of the worst things you can say.

When dealing with larger businesses the 'scale' question comes up from time to time about blogs. My answer? They're not supposed to!

Often media stories about blogs will talk of the lack of blog adoption from 'big business'...so what? Is it a problem that blogs are the territory of small business? Smaller organizations have always been nimbler and in many cases closer to their customers. That's a perfect combination for a blog. With respect to big business blogs are we just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole? The well executed corporate blogs are more a product of a specific individual than a corporate initiative. As I always say corporations don't blog, people do.

I understand why some things have to scale, i.e. somebody has invested some money and growth is necessary to cash out, but blogging is not always about scaling. Blogging is about relationships, connecting with your audience/friends/clients. Yes blogs offer some scale in their ability for an unlimited number of people to read your blog and syndicate your content via RSS, but conversation can only scale so far. Many bloggers enjoy a decent number of comments that can be responded to in a reasonable manner, but there are many larger blogs that simply can't respond to the comment volume. Is the blog less valuable if the blogger simply can't respond to comments? No, but the sense of conversation is gone.

Perhaps we should scale back our thoughts on corporate blogs. A corporate blog doesn't have to (and shouldn't) be this all-encompassing look into an organization written by the C-level folks. Start small and intimate (and perhaps stay there). Let a product team blog about their little world, after all they're probably just one of the 100+ items that ACME Corporation sells. That type of blog allows for focused conversation among the people that make that product and the people that want it. How does that scale? Slowly let the other product groups start to blog, each of them creating their own little neighborhood.

You can't scale a blog by throwing more money at it or executing a marketing plan and that's what confounds many corporations.