Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog
C. G. Lynch at CIO.com has Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog from the just-completed Enterprise 2.0 conference:
Proponents say an in-house blog can be like a bulletin board, communication tool and culture enhancement. Plus, it's better than tracking projects by e-mail.
The primary focus of the discussion is around using blogs for project management, such as for project updates. Lynch interviewed several proponents of corporate blogging, and this is a pleasant and positive view of the value of blogging.
Here are the Seven Reasons to Start themselves:
- Your enterprise e-mail applications are not easy to search.
- Your e-mail is lost in the eye of the "cc storm."
- Ex-employees can take it with them.
- Too much wasted time checking in with colleagues.
- With blogs, the humble and the egotist both win.
- Organizational openness and accountability.
- People might already be using them.
In a recent discussion on the ACT-KM discussion list, someone mentioned that blogging is just one means of communication - that it isn't the be-all, end-all of knowledge sharing. I like this reminder because promoters tend to fall all over themselves with fantastic claims. On the other side, blogging provides a means of communication that people may need and don't currently have within their organization. This article suggests that some of the signs above are evidence that people are looking for some other means of communication.
[Thanks to Dennis D McDonald for the reminder to check the article.]
2 Comment(s)
"With blogs, the humble and the egotist both win."
Jack, all seven points are good ones but I was particularly struck by the one I have quoted above since it hints at what I always hoped discussion boards would be -- self-regulating, occasionally self-deprecating but never self congratulatory.
Of course, some will use blogs to vent their spleens about their employers but such people will always find outlets for their dissatisfactions and, equally, perhaps there may be a common thread running through such irritations that are not voiced elsewhere in organizations.
Blogosphere is evolving -- there are no rights and wrongs but there must be more experiments not the controlled type best suited to the laboratory. Instead explorations of trying out new things to see what fits and what doesn't, what attracts comment and what blocks it. This comes back to the point I quoted since it seems blogs are succeeding where discussion boards have failed -- they invite comment and provide a place where both the egotist and the humble can have their say if not their day.
David
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The only things I would add would be an easy-to-use feed aggregator and maybe even a social bookmark system. These three (blogs, aggregators, bookmarks) are the basic tools for moving to a more effective information-sharing workplace.