DELL opened a retail store in Dallas last week.

The computer giant usually sells direct to customers over the phone or the internet. But recently Dell has been hit by accusations of poor customer service, sales have been hurt and its share price has fallen.

The store is meant to showcase why, in the catchprase of its old TV ads, “Dude! You’re getting a Dell.”

Most people will never visit the store but it’s up there on Dell’s website for all the world to see. There is even a video tour and customers are invited to share their opinions.

“Is this supposed to impress me?” asked Rod. “Wow! A physical store with PCs! What an idea! How did Dell come up with that?” Jonas asked sarcastically.

“I would never purchase a Dell if they were the last computers on earth, your customer service stinks!” wrote Ian O’Sullivan.

Welcome to the world of the corporate blog.

More and more companies are joining the blogosphere. Blogs — short for weblogs — are online journals that invite readers to pass on their comments. Good or bad.

Bloggers like Arianna Huffington (www.huffingtonpost.com) and Matt Drudge (www.drudgereport.com) have become major voices in US news, but so far many corporations have fought shy of joining the online debate.

Dell’s blog was triggered in large part by a spat with another influential blogger, Jeff Jarvis.

Last summer Dell would not replace Jarvis’s faulty computer. The journalist and new-media consultant started chronicling Dell’s poor service in painful detail on his blog, Buzzmachine.com. His “Dell Hell” postings hit a nerve. At one point the blog was receiving about 10,000 visits a day.

At first Dell chose to ignore Jarvis. “They said their policy was look but don’t touch,” he said. “That was a mistake.”

Now, said Jarvis, Dell seemed to have made some serious improvements — at least with its blog. “The first step for companies is not to write blogs but to read them. The conversation has already started and they need to listen,” he said.

A Dell spokesman refused to comment on the Jarvis spat, but said the blog was “exceeding expectations”.

But, say internet consultants, many companies are still terrified by the idea of blogging. The interactive nature of blogs means customers can say what they want about a company and ask awkward questions.

Companies also fear what their employees might say and that corporate blogs will attract special-interest groups keen to attack a corporation.

“Corporations being corporations there is a lot of fear about doing something for the first time,” said Mark Rogers, chief executive of Market Sentinel, a company specialising in corporate reputations on the web. “This has led to a weird situation where companies are not punching their weight online.”

Rogers said that 75% of car buyers now searched online before they went ahead with making a purchase. “If companies don’t figure out what is going to turn up online when they make those searches, they are going to have a problem.”

A corporate blog is a way of redressing the balance. Most companies have more “authority” about their brand than a blogger, said Rogers. But if a company is failing to communicate with its customers online, the opportunity is there for someone else to fill that gap — and the company may not like what they have to say.

Structurally many companies find blogging difficult. Speaking with one voice is a hard task when a company contains so many. The chief executive blog is one way around that problem. In America, Sun Microsystems boss Jonathan Schwartz is an avid blogger, as is Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.com.

In Britain, Charles Dunstone, founder of Carphone Warehouse, has been blogging about his Talk Talk broadband offer, and also using the blog to attack rivals, including BT.

And BT is about to hit back with a blog from John Petter, its chief operating officer.

“Customers are suspicious of ‘corporate speak’ and they want it straight from the horse’s mouth,” Petter said in a recent interview. “Especially in a big company, they want to know someone is taking responsibility.”

But, said Rogers, companies need to be very careful that they are being sincere.

“If you lie or are seen to lie, you are going to get into a lot of trouble,” he said.

Jarvis said openness and honesty were key to the success of corporate blogs. He pointed to Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee whose open and often critical blog helped humanise a company that has a reputation for being aggressive and secretive.

Another Microsoft blogger, Philip Su, recently gave this insight into working at the software giant: “Deep in the bowels of Windows (the business), there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth.”

The criticisms of Microsoft are already out there. Allowing its employees to air them shows a willingness to acknowledge them and, perhaps, to change.

Customers and people who work for a company often know the business better than those who run it, said Jarvis.

Blogging is a conversation, and the first and most important step for companies is to listen.

As for Jarvis’s Dell: “A year later someone called to fix the problem — but I’d changed to Apple by then,” he said.

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