Why Blog Internally?

Several  years after the debut of blogging, many companies are embracing internal corporate blogs for the purpose of enhancing their ability to collaborate and communicate. Internal blogs provide the advantage of rapid content delivery, ease of use, low implementation cost, and the availability of technologies such as RSS Feeds that notify employees of updates within relevant conversations.

Additional benefits of internal blogging include:

• Improved organization collaboration and the opportunity for team learning. Internal blogs can also be ideal for running projects and working with dispersed teams.
• An efficient means for group leaders to communicate both within their teams and with a broader company audience that would find the information being share useful for their own projects.
• A collecting place for interpretations of different points of view, making disparate ideas available to all team members for discussion.
• An ability to capture the collective intelligence of a team throughout a project.

There are many kinds of internal blogs throughout the corporate world, each serving different audience and having different goals.

Knowledge Blogs
Provide employees with information and insights about the company including new, business intelligence, reports and ongoing projects with the company.

Collaboration Blogs
Provides teams or multiple teams the ability to share ideas and capture the ongoing discussions is such a way that it is easily referenced when applicable in the future.

Cultural Blogs
Builds or strengthens organizational culture through more informal content.

So why isn't every organization blogging? There are still lots of questions and concerns about enabling such an open dialog. The best way to encourage adoption of such ideas and allowing individuals the freedom to express themselves by providing and promoting guidelines.

Such guidelines can include:

• Appoint an champion to lead by example
• Keep criticism constructive
• Stay on topic
• Clearly define the role of the blog - be sure that is serves a specific need
• Be authentic, transparent and conversational

Remember, the team was hired for their talent and intelligence - you might as well give them a place where they can have a voice.