A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. - Wikipedia
Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that's quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this whenever you needed the information, would make your life a lot easier wouldn't it?
So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It's very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of its search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.
The Blog is a platform that's relatively easy to manage and can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren't are reasonably inexpensive. Always a good angle to push when you have a tight budget.
Using these Blogs within your organization or project team is a great way to promote sharing of thoughts and ideas.
There are generally three types of Corporate Blogs:
- The CEO Blog
- The External Blog
- The Internal Blog
CEO Blogs
CEO Blogs have been gaining popularity for a while now as it becomes a medium for employees and people outside the company to connect with the leadership.
External Blogs
External blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients and vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo's that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.
While external blogs are great tools for communication their primary purpose is for PR.
Internal Blogs
Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration than was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas or that is absent from 'reviewed' documentation. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.
It becomes a medium to allows users from different sections of the organization to connect with each other. More importantly it becomes a conduit to allow people to talk about subjects that are not part of their regular job description.
Constraints
There are of course a number of constraints when blogging within a company. The most predominant is that employees are generally a lot more careful about what they say and how they say it. Unlike a personal blog there is always an apprehension about how what they say is going to be perceived. This could act as a hurdle to many of them blogging.
Selling the Idea
The leadership team would be very interested in promoting blogging as long as you have clearly defined goals of how you are going to harness the knowledge.
You might try talking to employees about the advantages of having a platform they can use to share their ideas and be recognized. A blog becomes a powerful tool to market themselves.
So, if you're company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.