Tom Raggett picks up on a long article with a strong bibliography entitled Blogging the Market, by George N. Dafermos
The article makes some good points and considers various practical examples, but it is fundamentally about facilitating horizontal, direct conversations with the market that transend organisational boundaries

“Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases that besides have limited effectiveness in a connected market economy. For years it has been suggested that online communities will revolutionalise the way organisations operate, however, the only social process/technological infrastructure that has reached this potential and is dynamically evolving is the weblog. It takes no technical savvy to set up a weblog and start talking to your customers. That’s why weblogs are huge: they take the power out of the IT department and the webmaster’s hegemony and hand it over to where knowledge really resides – to the individual workers who are knowledgeable enough and know how to speak with a human voice. Now, organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance, and as a result the organisation becomes truly hyperlinked and power shifts to where knowledge actually resides.”