Should my company blog?

The question has been asked and answered hundreds of times. Should my company blog? From the responses I have seen the answer usually is: "If you have people with talent and knowledge and they are willing to commit to posting regularly, go for it."

So what should I blog about?
This is where opinions begin to vary. On one hand there is a school that thinks you should blog about your company, your work, and your industry. Another thought is that you should let your writers, often times employees, blog about what interests them personally. Let's compare these:

Only write about the industry and the company - This seems to be a more traditional way of thinking. A way of maintaining a brand identity through tight control and dictation of the message that your organization releases. In a way this is taking baby steps from the traditional bureaucratic method of message control: "The public will know only what we want them to know". The benefit is that those who care about your company will now have slightly more information about your company and where it stands, primarily from a financial and business stand point. The drawback is that as consumers gain the ability to find information with relative ease your company's ability to control the message is increasingly diminished.

Write about anything and everything - As consumers gain power to form their opinions of your company it seems wise to portray your company as a diverse and welcoming organization. Allowing employees to publish with little or no restriction seems to be a wonderful way of increasing corporate transparency and allowing this diversity to flourish. There are risks though. Your company must stand for something. I am not talking about a moral or strategic plan that you must alway adhere to, but rather you company claims to be something. They have a brand promise. Maybe it is to be the best in lean manufacturing, or to offer the best solution for small business networking. If your website is continually populated with stories of Carl's fishing trips and most of your clients care nothing about fishing, confusion may arise. Not because Carl's fishing is bad (on the contrary it does indeed add to the diversity of your organization), but because you may have alienated a subset of your client base. This leads me to a growing opinion and option for corporate bloggers:

Write everything, but segment to promote those things that will interest and activate your core demographic - Obviously writing about your industry should be of interest to your core demographic. There are also other things that will interest them. There should be other topics that you can say "yes" to. Maybe fishing is one of them. Maybe not. What I argue the correct answer to "What should I blog?" is: Research your target audience, determine what they have interest in, blog on that, don't restrict from an opinion standpoint, and allow other writers to contribute in a category dealing with "individual likes, or lifestyles". Using either a custom built site (maybe Rails) or something like this, built on Drupal or Wordpress, you can categorize and promote the most interesting or primary topics to the front page, but allow all else to exist for those who really want to know who you are.

Just because you need to focus on things interesting to your core audience doesn't mean you have to gag the mouth of anyone in your organization. Yes, there may be times when appropriate to censor the speech of an individual, but trying to keeps opinions out is what makes the "dirty little secrets" such big news, when they inevitably surface.