Internal Corporate Blogging: 6 Reasons Why!

An email account has since become the ‘old-school’ method of managing a person’s information.  If it is nearly impossible to find information or  effectively manage your documents, you might be ready for your workplace to introduce a blogging content management system on the corporate intranet.   Below are 6 reasons why you should persuade your boss to implement this growing trend.

1. Enterprise e-mail programs are not easily searchable.  This prevents people from getting key information that might be buried in a colleague’s inbox. The management of information often fails because the benefit is usually focused on the company, not the individual. Wouldn’t it just be much easier to keep all information about a particular subject in one place, like a blog?

2. E-mails are often lost in the eye of the ‘CC: mixups’. Corporate e-mails and information sharing is haphazard and disorganised. The information that gets passed along to anyone largely relies on the prerogative of the sender. Did he put you in the “to” or “cc” (carbon copy) field or the politically charged “bc” (for blind copy)? Sometimes, people merely forget to include key players or worse, sometimes the omission is intentional. “If there is information in a cc storm and you’re not on it, then you don’t have any idea about what’s going on,” says Chris Alden, executive vice president with Six Apart, an enterprise blogging vendor. With blogs, the enterprise has greater control over the information about specific topics on the intranet, as critical information can be broadcasted to all who want to see it and who have permission to see it.

3. Ex-employees can take information when they leave. When an employee leaves, odds are the e-mail account becomes dissolved and all the valuable information that lived in that person’s account disappears into a data wasteland. Whereas, if it’s in a blog, it does not disappear when employees leave.

4. Too much wasted time checking in with colleagues. A lot of communication between employees is asking for simple updates and so forth which consumes precious time for the business. A blog provides a method of logging that information without the cumbersome process of constantly sending “what have you been working on lately” types of e-mails.

5. Organizational openness and accountability. There is a fair amount of catty behavior that occurs over e-mail, and petty politics play a part sometimes about who gets an e-mail. Who is on the “to” field? Who is on the “cc” field? Did theyreally spinelessly include their boss in a “bc” field to humiliate a colleague? With blogs, it encourages open information, communication and debate without alienating certain people or encouraging bickering between colleagues before an e-mail thread is escalated to the boss.

6. People might already be using them. Odds are, the tech savvy users have already brought things like a Blogger or WordPress account into the enterprise and are blogging with or without your knowledge. As such, being able to set a company policy and giving them an outlet in which their blogging skills can help the whole enterprise makes sense.

Giving new employees the tools they expect (including blogging) it is thought to be useful in attracting new employees. The ability to quickly locate employees with who share common interests “scuba diving, ping pong, wine tasting” through their blogs may help new employees integrate quickly into the corporate fabric.  A enterprise in particular that would strongly benefit from an internal blogging strategy is the International Geological Congress (IGC), which is one of the most important global geological conventions. It is held once every four years and attracts thousands of delegates from all over the world.  At the moment the vast majority of communication is conducted via email and through announcements on their website. For those interested in the next conference, you can RSVP here.

Comments (5)

  1. Great post! Through your post it shows that you are not a fan of email, is this true?
    I know I hate email time of the day, so many useless unread emails.

    • Probably not, as a blog is not the best communication tool, but rather a system to share useful information. We might look into starting a Wiki on the network though.

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