Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2009, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Back in 2009, a writer at the Washington Post filed a story for the Business section. The headline announced, several years belatedly, that marketing was moving to the blogosphere. For anyone who had spent time watching the web evolve, the piece landed with a gentle thud. Companies like Honest Tea, Bill Marriott, and web agency Viget Labs were profiled as though the corporate blog were some curious new experiment. For those of us in digital publishing at the time, it felt less like news and more like archaeology — the Post had finally noticed something that had been building since around 2004.
That lag matters more than it might seem. Not because it embarrasses a legacy newsroom, but because it tells us something enduring about how institutions relate to the open web. They watch from a cautious distance, then scramble to explain what early adopters already know. And when they do arrive, they tend to frame it as a trend rather than a shift.
What the Post actually got right
The Honest Tea example in that Washington Post article was, genuinely, a good one. When the company announced that Coca-Cola would acquire a 40 percent stake in the brand, customers who opposed the deal took their frustration to the blog. CEO Seth Goldman didn’t close comments or redirect people to a press release. He took the most substantive criticism he could find and responded to it, point by point, in public.
That’s not a marketing tactic. That’s a fundamentally different posture toward your audience — one that says the conversation matters more than the message. And it worked precisely because it was uncomfortable. The blog became a record of genuine deliberation, not polished spin.
That model, in 2009, was still rare enough to be newsworthy. The dominant corporate instinct at the time was exactly the opposite: tight control of messaging, legal sign-off on every public sentence, a fear of giving employees — or customers — a voice that couldn’t be managed.
The fear that held companies back
The reluctance wasn’t irrational. One Fortune 100 company I was consulting with at the time was genuinely worried about employees blogging publicly as identifiable representatives of the organisation. What they didn’t know — and what unsettled them when they found out — was that hundreds of their headquarters staff were already blogging independently. Thousands more had active profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.
The conversation was already happening. The only question was whether the company would participate in it.
That dynamic has never fully gone away. It’s just migrated. Today the same tension plays out around employee advocacy on LinkedIn, brand accounts on TikTok, and the question of whether a company should have a public Slack channel or Discord community. The instinct to control messaging runs deep, and it doesn’t yield easily to evidence.
Where corporate blogging went
Corporate blogging, as a format, peaked somewhere around 2012 to 2015 and then fragmented. Some companies doubled down on long-form content and built genuine editorial operations — HubSpot and Moz are the obvious examples, both of whom treated their blogs as audience assets rather than marketing expenses. Others abandoned the format for social media, then abandoned social media for newsletters, then started circling back to owned content as platform algorithms became less predictable.
Companies that publish consistently still see meaningful returns — but the metrics they care about have shifted. Traffic matters less than it once did. Authority, trust, and search visibility in an AI-influenced landscape matter more.
What Honest Tea understood intuitively in 2005 — that a blog is a place for honest thinking, not polished messaging — is essentially the brief for effective content in 2025. The form has evolved, but the underlying logic hasn’t.
The deeper pattern
There’s something worth sitting with here, beyond the specifics of corporate blogging.
The Washington Post’s slow arrival to the corporate blogging story is a version of something that happens repeatedly: institutions discover, then explain, then eventually mainstream ideas that originated in the open web’s margins. By the time the explanation reaches a broad audience, the early adopters have usually moved on to something more interesting.
For creators and independent publishers, that gap is actually useful. It means the ideas that feel obvious to you right now are probably not yet obvious to the organisations and brands that will eventually need your expertise. The lag between the open web and institutional awareness has always been a source of professional opportunity for people who work in this space.
The question the Washington Post story raised — whether companies could genuinely open themselves to unfiltered dialogue with their audiences — remains live. Most can’t. A few do it well. The ones that do tend to understand something that’s easy to say and hard to mean: that losing control of the conversation is not the same as losing the conversation.
What holds up
Honest Tea’s approach in 2005 and 2009 was, by any reasonable measure, ahead of its time. Acknowledge the controversy publicly. Engage the most substantive critics directly. Let people see how you reason, not just what you decide.
That model didn’t require a blog. It required a certain relationship to transparency. The blog was just the infrastructure. In 2025, that infrastructure might be a newsletter, a Substack comment thread, a Discord, or a LinkedIn post that invites real pushback instead of performing it.
The medium keeps changing. The underlying question — are you willing to have an actual conversation with the people your work affects? — stays the same. And the organisations that answer yes, in whatever format, still stand out for doing so.
The Washington Post was late to notice. Most of the institutions that matter to your work probably still are.
