Below is another edition of our guest blogger, Don Dunnington’s “Short Takes on Travel” series. This month’s post talks about blogging and how you can feel safe making that leap into social media for your own business.

When first thinking about blogging or other social media, the hardest thing for most organizations to grasp is the idea of an online voice. It’s hard enough for serious independent bloggers to get the right mix of casual tone and expert authority. You want to write with the spontaneity of an impromptu talk, but you have to give sufficient thought so you aren’t going to find yourself wishing five minutes later that you hadn’t clicked the publish button.

It’s the speed and spontaneity of blogging, Twitter and Facebook that make it especially nerve wracking for large organizations to enter this space. When you’re accustomed to carefully vetting words destined for public consumption, it’s a frightening thing to contemplate letting words run loose on the Internet. But as Debbie Weil demonstrates in her Corporate Blogging Book, if you don’t loosen up, you run an even greater risk by getting tagged a phony and doing real damage to your online image.

How do you know if you got the voice right? Well, does it sound like you’re reading from a script or an annual report? If readers feel like a robot wrote it, or they’re being subjected to an online version of one of those awful cold calls, you lose twice: you quickly send your audience away bored, and they go away convinced that you can’t be trusted to talk straight.

For any serious blogger the single most important objective is to become a trusted source. That means establishing a voice that sounds real, not filtered by sales, marketing, senior management or twenty lawyers. So the first obstacle for corporate bloggers is to summon the courage of the organization to engage freely in online media. Your next task is to overcome the built-in skepticism of a public hardwired to distrust paid spokespersons.

Yet overcoming skepticism really shouldn’t be all that hard for service-oriented companies. Simply try thinking about your online voice from your customer’s perspective. This should be particularly easy for the travel industry, where customer interaction plays such a central role in your brand’s success. Take a look at quality hotel brands where you have hundreds and thousands of customer-facing employees who deal daily with guest needs, problems and desires. One of the best examples can be found in an interview by Robert Reiss with Simon F. Cooper, president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company (“How Ritz-Carlton Stays At The Top” at Forbes.com). Cooper told Reiss:

“We entrust every single Ritz-Carlton staff member, without approval from their general manager, to spend up to $2,000 on a guest. And that's not per year. It's per incident. When you say up to $2,000, suddenly somebody says, wow, this isn't just about rebating a movie because your room was late, this is a really meaningful amount. It doesn't get used much, but it displays a deep trust in our staff's judgment.”

That’s worth repeating: “a deep trust in our staff’s judgment.” Of course as Cooper makes clear in the interview, that deep trust is based on an equally deep commitment to staff training and development.

There’s a question here for companies that want to jump on the social media bus before it runs them over. Are your employees empowered to meet a customer’s desires on-the-spot, without reading a script or consulting higher authorities? Then you’re ready for social media because that’s exactly what your bloggers need to do: deal with real world interests and problems and help your readers feel rewarded for having spent their time with you.