Week 4: Internal Blogs

As I wrote in my last post, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute outlines 10 value levers relating to social technology implementation within business and the 5 parts of the business value chain which they fall under. This time, I will be writing about a different lever, collaboration and communication, which fall under enterprise wide levers. This lever is about how a company can simplify communications; reduce in-person meetings; and increasing collaboration and the sharing of internal knowledge. A great way of achieving this is through the implementation of an internal blog.

So how and why should you write an internal blog? Well firstly it’s a good way to foster collaboration within the company. Not only are people already more likely to communicate with others they already know virtually than in person, but it can also connect people from different departments or shifts that would normally have never encountered each other before. This means that a more diverse set of people are able to collaborate together on various projects. Internal blogs are also a great way to store and share company knowledge. They are an easy way for employees to stay up to date with news from within the company or quickly send out their own knowledge which they feel others should hear about, such as what happened in a meeting or what they have been doing on a project. Unlike emails, blogs cannot become lost, buried or forgotten to be sent and are a lot easier to search. Blogs also generally aren’t deleted when someone quits or is fired, and therefore that employee’s knowledge isn’t lost with them. Internal blogs work well for many types of workers. Those who may be viewed slightly narcissistic or attention seeking have an outlet where they can write about all the good work they feel everyone should know they’ve done and their co-workers who dislike them can easily not follow or ignore the blog (which is a lot harder to do if they are constantly clogging your inbox). Meanwhile, those who are more modest may just use their blog as a way to keep others informed or as a way of organising themselves. Finally, many workers may already use this technology in their personal lives and have some great ideas about how it could be used within the company, or may even already be doing so without their boss’ knowledge. Therefore it would be a great idea to begin listening to what the employees want by implementing a company policy on how these technologies could be used for improvement throughout the business.

IBM is a technology company, notable for its usage of internal blogs. The business has a long history with social media, starting in the 1970s with forums being created for mainframe programmers. They now, among many other products, sell social software for implementation within businesses, such as IBM Connections (which they even have their own employees using). Using internal blogs within the company was the idea of Luis Benitez, IBM’s social software product manager. He found it hard to keep up with his work and emails and already ran a personal blog, so he decided to create one for work as well. He found that this eventually greatly reduced his emails. This is especially important as not only are blogs preferable to emails for a number of reasons I discussed earlier, but also because IBM, like almost every other email provider, has a storage quota placed on its employee’s accounts. This means that if they are sent too many or receive a number of large files, this limit can be quickly met and workers are forced to spend precious time on sorting through and deleting old emails, reducing their productivity. In 2005, the company as a whole began embracing blogging technologies, with a blogging policy and guidelines being written over two weeks on an internal wiki by the same employees who would later be using the blogs. Now, the company has 17000 blogs as well as microblogging capabilities within Connections and the company has implemented an online course on how to use their blog appropriately.

That’s all for this post. Do you know of any other companies using internal blogs? Let me know in the comments.