David Weinberger tends to get a bit excited.

And yesterday at the BlogOn Conference, he breathlessly paced the stage as he tried to enlighten the marketing teams, ad agency flacks and product managers in the audience with a single, simple lesson:

"Your customers know more about your products than you do."

It's an idea oft-repeated by other online luminaries. But it was fun to watch marketing guru Weinberger try to pound this idea into the collective consciousness of the business world, many representatives of which gazed up at Weinberger with the eager eyes of impressionable freshmen in a survey course.

Now to be fair, until I attended this conference, I didn't appreciate exactly how difficult it was for companies to understand blogging. (Don't think Publish.com's publisher, Ziff Davis, escapes this critique either. Ziff was slow to launch blogs and has yet to implement them in the most efficacious manner.)

I guess that's why Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book on the subject.

So, why don't companies "get" blogging? Because, as Weinberger said, "Companies look at blogs and they think 'risk.'"

And there is a lot to risk there. For decades, modern companies have functioned as fortresses, lowering the drawbridge to disseminate information at their leisure.

Panel sees pros and cons to corporate blogs. Click here to read more.

A company used to be the only source of information about their products. Take a look at an old product catalog.

Advertisers could once market their products as panaceas to cure all evils. But advertising style has evolved (thank ye gods), and that is in part because advertisers began to respect the sophistication of the consumer.

That's what blogs are, in part, about: respect. In order for product companies to deploy blogs effectively, they must learn to respect their customers.

Concurrently, the first question a corporation should ask is, "why do we want to blog?"

The answer, according to Weinberger, is simple: You want to learn from their experience, and you want to create a more intimate connection with them.

"When you're reading a blog you have to go in with a sense of preemptive forgiveness," Weinberger said, noting the difference between blogging and traditional edited journalism.

"You have to assume that your readers will forgive you…and that kind of forgiveness creates an intimacy between readers and writers."

It's unfortunate that it's exactly this intimacy that is nearly impossible for companies to create. How do you blog with personality, yet stay on message? How do you give people what they want without sacrificing your brand?

Weinberger's suggestions:

Listen to the blogosphere and listen to your customers.

Do an internal audit of your employees "in a non-threatening way" to see what blogs they read or how they get information online.

If you decide to blog, engage the reader. "Don't assume that the best person in your company to blog is your CEO or COO or someone from your marketing team."

Give up control. "You can't do this if you insist that you're going to be able to control everything that happens on your blog."

Weinberger also said that if and when companies do blog, they're going to make two mistakes:

1. You're going to insist on being right. You're going to insist that you know more than your customers. Well you don't! Because you don't use your product!

2. You're going to insist on being incredibly boring. You're going to put up the most boring, boring, boring blog in history. Maybe over time you'll learn to give up enough control to make your blog interesting.

Perhaps the most salient point of wisdom of the day was Weinberger's admission to an audience member that he didn't understand an acronym she used.

Click here to read about blog spammers taking aim at Google.

When she replied with the answer, he looked up at the audience and repeated a maxim that would serve the corporate communications world well as they figure out how to blog:

"It's important to be stupid and fallible in public."

This is the lesson at the heart of corporate blogging.

If you want to converse with your customers, you need to stop pretending you know more than they do. You have to allow for different points of view.

And you have to be magnanimous enough to admit your mistakes and learn from them.

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