Businesses have been slow to respond to the threats posed by weblogs and equally slow to capitalise on the opportunities they present, according to the results of a survey of public relations consultants released today.

Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm’s reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs - the online message boards and diaries which have become so popular in the past year.

A number of companies, including Ryanair and Land Rover, have been the subject of sustained, negative blogging campaigns, which have attracted the attention of the mainstream media.

It’s not all bad news, though. More than 80 per cent of respondents thought that either "quite a few" or "many" companies could benefit from the trend for blogging. They suggested that blogs provide customers with alternative means of communicating with customers and learning about their requirements.

Today’s news added weight to research published yesterday by Hostway, a web hosting company, which suggested that more than three quarters of consumers would consult a weblog to research a purchase. "They regard the consumers as more honest than the marketing department," said Paul Halfpenny, product manager for the firm.

He said the growth of blogging tools and search engines has made it easier for people to find what they are looking for, and the sheer number of blogs listed in Google search results means that many people stumble across them as they’re looking for products and services.

But Glen Drury, managing director of the online shopping company Kelkoo, said he was surprised by the findings. "It’s not a trend that I would identify," he said. "If you look at the United States, where blogging is much more established, more than half of people have never heard of a blog at all."

Mr Drury said that the importance of blogs is growing and that Yahoo!, the parent company of Kelkoo, is piloting a service in the US that allows people to organise search results, including blogs, so that pages created by people you know are prioritised.

"If you go out to a Vietnamese restaurant and you take three minute to rate that restaurant then one of your friends does a search for Vietnamese restaurants, your rating will appear above everybody else’s," he said.

This illustrates a key difference between blogs and their predecessors, the forums and bulletin boards. Plenty of sites offer brief, anonymous reviews of products and services, but users could have difficulty determining the trustworthiness of the reviewers. Blogs often provide readers with more information about the personality and outlook of the writer, lending their recommendations and warnings more credibility.

The power of blog has also won over some companies, which are using the medium to build a closer rapport with their customers. The Finnish antivirus company F-Secure runs a blog on which its security specialists post details of virus outbreaks and the work they do to counter them.

Mikko Hyppönen, the company's chief research officer, said the blog started almost by accident. It began as a way of tracing the spread of the MyDoom virus outbreak and continued when customers found it to be useful way of accessing information.

Although part of F-Secure’s official site, the blog is independent of the company’s management and marketing department, Mr Hyppönen said. "Nobody approves anything," he said. "Our virus-lab members post whatever they want to, and I think that is one of the reasons why it has such a loyal readership. We also believe that it builds our brand image."

Naturally there is also a dark side to the blog. Last year a Delta Airlines flight attendant was suspended for posting photographs of herself in uniform and in January a Waterstones employee lost his job after publishing unflattering comments about the company.

Mr Halfpenny said that 94 per cent of employees said they were unaware of any company policy on blogging, even though most firms strictly prohibit unauthorised contact with the press.

The lack of explicit guidance and the anonymity of the web can prove too much of a temptation, he said. "If you’ve got a problem with your company then it can be a good outlet for that. People think they can get away with it. The whole point of the internet is that you’re kind of invisible and you can be someone else."

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