Last week it was announced that Ogilvy would partner with Technorati and they would provide Ogilvy clients with blogs, video blogs, videos, photos and other online user-generated media.

“Ogilvy creatives and account teams will use Technorati’s conversational marketing products to build relationships between brands and conversations relevant to those brands. This will result in the the creation of destination sites, new forms of advertising and communities of interest.”

This will be interesting to watch and see what transpires from this. My initial thought was that this was yet another example of an agency creating another avenue for their clients to communicate to their customers, but not creating a way to better listen to their customers and most importantly understand them. I think we have seen numerous examples of companies jumping head first into the blogosphere and truly falling flat on their faces. The reason for this was that they did not understand who their customers were and what they were saying.

Developing a blog is the easy part of social media. Creating landing pages for people go to and read is nothing different than creating new landing pages for a pay per click campaign. Though if you want to capitalize on social media, there needs to be a great deal more than this.

A company needs to understand before launching a blog what issues and feedback they might receive. They must have procedures in place to not only hear what their customers are saying, but being able to respond to them quickly and correctly. And finally, a blog’s singular purpose is to engage with their readers. If a company is utilizing a blog for yet another avenue to put out press releases, they will soon realize that this blog will do nothing to enhance their brand and more often than not, it will hurt their company’s overall brand and reputation.

What do you think? If you were a Fortune 100 company, what would your initial steps be to launch a successful blog?

Technorati Tags: Ogilvy, Technorati, blogs, social media