Not every brand should blog.

I think of it this way.  Some women should not wear halter tops.  Some men should keep their shirts both buttoned and tucked inside their pants. Only a small percentage of people should be allowed to wear belly shirts or have a thumb or toe ring. These truths are as self-evident as all men being created equal.

So why are folks out there insisting that brands should blog?

John Moore (who is really smart and has a great blog) takes Starbucks’ CEO to task for not blogging.  Maybe he’s right, I don’t know.

But I’ve met a lot of companies and have gotten to know them pretty well.  And my advice to many of them:

“Put down the WordPress and slowly walk away.”

For those brands that do blog there’s now a club they can join.  It is called the Blog Council.  I exchanged some emails with one of its organizers and it seemed like a good enough idea — a cross between a “best practices” organization and group therapy for corporate bloggers.

But I don’t think that corporate / brand blogs — whether they exist or not — is the issue.

Rather, the issue is what do corporations and brands do when they’re besieged by the swarm of new media demands all going by the same name … blogs … and insisting to be treated like Walt Mossberg.

Unfortunately, many brands do the same thing that Target has done recently … blow them off.

The problem that most brands have with the blogosphere is not that they are not speaking properly through this new social medium.

It is that they are still trying to figure out how to listen to it.