Case In Point: How Feedburner Responded Via Blog

There are few organizations that shouldn't be blogging. Yes, I know that last week I said there are five characteristics of organizations that shouldn't blog, but I firmly believe every organization should do it and then deal with the other issues they have. That being said, Feedburner is a great case in point of why an organization should have a blog:

Over the weekend there was an issue with Google's Feedcatcher service and it basically messed up everyone's Feedburner subscription numbers. For bloggers who use Feedburner (like me), it's a constant gauge to see how how many people have chosen to track what you're talking about.

Now if you don't use Feedburner or aren't a blogger you may be thinking this is no big deal. The fact of the matter is, however, that tracking RSS feeds is one of the only reasons Feedburner exists, so when it can't track feeds their main service isn't working right and all the people who expect it to give them timely and accurate stats are going to see something vastly different. That's a big deal to many bloggers because they (and I'll include myself here) want accurate stats at all times. In this case it wasn't even Feedburner's fault, yet it still was their company who would be getting all the questions so they recognized the issue and wrote a blog post about it Sunday morning as a means to communicate to people what the problem was.

This was a win for Feedburner because they showed they're attentive to people's needs and proactive in giving information. The blog was simply the most logical place to get the message out. If your organization doesn't have a blog yet, how would you have responded? Would you have been able to proactively communicate the issue on a Sunday morning just as easy as any day of the week? Feedburner did.