A business blog has its golden rules and arguably the chief of these is that you don’t treat your weekly updates as press-releases by any other name.

It’s tempting of course. Perhaps you’ve signed a contract with an important customer or you have a new and innovative product just about to launch. Marketing and your PR company have come up with a spanking new press release that everyone’s happy with, so why not just tweak it slightly and put it out as the latest entry in the corporate blog. What’s the harm?

Well for one thing, it would be the wrong horse for entirely the wrong course. Press releases are – almost by definition – fairly bland creations. Designed and assembled by committee, they are designed to convey factual information with a garnish of positive spin. If they contain quotes from a CEO, senior manager or customer you can be sure that the words will be carefully chosen and very often blandly innocuous.

A blog, on the other hand, tends to be lot more rough and ready. It might be an instant response to an event in the marketplace that week, some blue sky thinking on business strategy or even a wry reflection on the joys of returning from holiday to face an overflowing in tray. Whatever the subject, it should be instantly engaging and anything but bland.

Perhaps more importantly, using blog updates as an extension of the press office may break your trust with readers. Blogging is about building communities and those who read what you have to say on a regular basis will be doing so because they find it educational, insightful or amusing. Some will be relaxed about the occasional overt sales pitch, others may well be less tolerant.

So does that mean you shouldn’t talk about new products or customer wins?

Well no it doesn’t, but what you probably should do is find a way of talking about these matters that is in keeping with the blog format.

Let’s take the product launch as an example. Let’s assume for a moment, your company’s blog is primarily intended for existing and potential customers. They won’t be averse to knowing about your new product and might well have seen the brochure or read a slightly edited version of the press release in the trade press.

So they’ll want something different , something that gets under the skin of your company and provides them with information they wouldn’t get elsewhere. This could take the form of a profile of the employee who came up with the idea (straight out of college and already revolutionising R&D); a description of how feedback from customers helped shape the product; or an anecdote about early reactions at a trade show. In other words, talk about the product but don’t simply trot out the press release.

And the truth is that blogging can be a great way of getting your commercial message across, provided you bear the expectations of the audience in mind.