In the first post of this series we learned that a blog is not a dairy, it is a genie. Blogs give people and organizations the ability to organize, publish, and promote themselves all at the click of a button. Today we will look at how a blog may be just the tool you need to organize yourself and your workforce.
First of all, let’s look at a few of the common features of a blog:
- A blog has entries (articles) that are posted in order by date
- Entries can be put into categories or tagged (labeled)
- Entries can link to other resources on the internet
- Others can comment on the entries (if allowed)
- Multiple people can be allowed to post entries
How can these features be harnessed to help your organization? As Andy Wibbels brought out in his book BlogWild: A Guide for Small Business Blogging, organizations can benefit greatly from an “internal blog,” a private blog that only you and your employees can view and use.
What would we want to have an internal blog for? Two words: communication and community.
Since blogs take relatively little technical skill to use (if you can send an email you can post on a blog) and disseminate information with so much speed, they can be an excellent way to spread news in an organization and receive feedback from multiple people all at the same time. This feedback comes in the form of comments left at the bottom of the article. In addition to general feedback, relevant internal and external sources can be cited using links. All of this creates a centralized knowledge base of information and an archive of past work and news. And since a blog is organize by dates, categories and labels (and is “searchable”) it is easy for everyone in the organization to find the particular information they need.
In short, an internal blog can become the hive or hub of your organization. Around it all of your people can congregate and collectively contribute to the continual improvement of the company.
We will look into this collective contributing (collaboration), and how it can be used to document and enhance your business systems, in the next article of this series:
“Productivity ala blogs: How to use blogs to brainstorm and write operations manuals”
So stay tuned!
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resources on the use of internal blogs:
http://www.llrx.com/features/internalblogs.htm
http://www.bigblogcompany.net/index.php/products_services/individual/internal_blogs/
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060214_402499.htm
http://www.blogtronix.com/CorporateBlogging/54