Corporate Blogging

Communication on the workfloor has been holding my interest for quite some time. Today I was browsing through a blog that was given to my by my former trainee supervisor Henk Post. In it was an interesting post which refered to a few points made by Matt Moore on corporate blogging and how to encourage it.

Moore’s corporate blogging method would be:

• Give everyone in your organisation permission to set up their own blogger/typepad account. Ask them to give you a link to their RSS feed when they’ve done that.
• Give them a list of things they absolutely cannot talk about. Try to make it relatively short. You can’t make this list short? Then may be you aren’t ready for this yet. If they want to check anything with you then give them that option & respond quickly & decisively.
• Make it clear to their managers that blogging should not be punished – provided people are doing their jobs. If they are not doing their jobs then find out why – don’t just blame the blogging.
• Advise them to be nice to people. Remind them that this is in public. “The evil that men do lives after them”.
• Advise them to think of 3-4 business-related things that they are passionate about.
• Advise them to find 10 people that blog about each of those things. Look at the posts. Look at the comments fields. Do these people link to each other? What world are they about to step into?
• Let them get on with it. They can work out when they feel ready to step into conversations. They can talk about that with you if they want.
• Read their RSS feeds & give them a bit of encouragement. Be their first audience.
• Only intervene if someone really screws up. You can’t handle someone screwing up? Then may be you aren’t ready for this yet. Suggest that your bloggers talk to each other about their experiences.
• Don’t treat them as another “channel” for messages – they are not a ventriloquist’s dummy. But do treat them as conversational partners.
• See who has kept it going after 6 months. Do something nice for them (preferably involving the blog).

Blogging allows you to:

• Talk to customers & partners at all levels.
• Scan the environment for change.
• Identify potential thought leaders.

All for very little cost.

The idea of using multimedia technology to smoothen the communication -within- a company holds a great interest to me, and the use of blogs is one I had not even considered yet. This leads me to think that a lot of communication methods used by the general public holds the potential to be used on a smaller scale, such as the working environment of a corporation.

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