Bloggers are rare. Strange as it may seem with millions of blogs being posted every day, blogging is a minority activity. Yet as anyone who knows anything about Search Engine Optimisation will tell you, blogging is a sure-fire way to get attention. So it’s a surprise that so few businesses are turning their web sites into blogs.

Research published in Entrepreneur magazine shows that 21% of business marketing staff are not familiar with the term “Web 2.0” – the new technology collection that includes blogging, social networking and so on. Surprisingly, of the marketing people who are aware of what Web 2.0 can offer, only a third of them are using such technologies. What this means is that three quarters of all businesses are not using any kind of Web 2.0 features, such as blogs.

Considering that the term “Web 2.0” was brought into play over four years ago it is worrying that business has become slow to change online. Most businesses do find change difficult anyway, but online things change within days, so speed of response is essential. What has happened now is that most businesses have allowed a huge four-year window to open up, meaning that online competition has grown against these traditional firms. That means when they do eventually take up blogging, they are going to find it very hard to get search engine positioning and resulting traffic because of the people who have been blogging away happily on their topic for the past few years.

The lesson for anyone in business is do not put off adopting new online technologies. If you do, someone online will take up the challenge and reduce your future impact. So if you haven’t started a blog yet – do it today.