The company has thousands of employees worldwide who make up about one-fifth of the blog's readership and comment frequently.
Marriott doesn't use computers. Instead, he dictates entries into a recorder and a staff member transcribes and posts them. The audio is also on the site, which averages about 6,000 visitors a week and has had more than 600,000 total visitors since its inception in January 2007.
The company has made more than $5 million in bookings from people who clicked through to the reservation page from Marriott's blog.
Viget Labs, a Web consulting firm in suburban Falls Church, Va., began a blog in 2006. In his field, it's practically obligatory, Chief Executive Brian Wynne Williams said. "If we didn't blog, people would start to wonder about us," he said.
The one blog has since expanded to five, each focused on a division of the company.
Wynne Williams said Viget's blogs, which target industry peers, have had a "huge impact on recruiting."
"Anybody that we've hired in the past couple of years, I think any of them would tell you that they read the blog heavily to get a sense of our people," he said.
Although blogs may not yield immediate results, they can be part of a "halo effect" that gives a business a bigger online presence, said consultant Debbie Weil, author of "The Corporate Blogging Book."
"I think that the really important thing about using a blog as a business strategy is that usually you cannot connect the dots directly from blogs to revenue," Weil said.
The strategy part is important because a blog may not work for every business. Before starting one, companies have to "make sure that the blog fits in with the existing culture of the company," said Walter Carl, a professor of communications at Northeastern University who has studied corporate blogging. He says a blog is a "really bad idea" for companies that are secretive or tend toward nondisclosure.
As Weil said, "Some brands are just not hip, informal, conversational."
