Internal blogs

With all of the talk about what seems external corporate blogging I thought I might reflect on internal corporate blogging. I guess kind of like Jeremy Wright did a couple of days ago of business blogging overall.

It seems that most of the commentary to date (that I have seen at least) seems to have been driven by the PR and marketing types, when most bloggers seem to be neither. While thinking I was wondering what does it take to get blogging to begin within an organisation, sort of what is the catalyst, as this is my area of interest. Then I remembered a statement the Guy Kawasaki made in Rules for Revolutionaries, which I have just finished reading again, on creating virtual communities.

Guy provides 5 points while very relevant to external corporate blogging I think are just as relevant to the internal side.

1. Community before commerce
2. Communication comes next
3. Place the community's interest above your own
4. Tolerate criticism
5. Encourage "personalities"

I feel it is very important for all organisations looking at blogging as a form of communication to begin the process from the correct point of view. By this I mean not to try and use blogging to cover holes in their management practices, a company with poor management practices might just pay lip service to the whole process and in the end the process will fail. Either your customers or employees will see through the rhetoric. Therefore if you are going to start make sure you begin for the right reasons.

Internal blogging can be a very good method of developing employee engagement, by engagement I am talking about capturing the hearts and minds of employees. You create engagement through involvement, listening and understanding all of which can be developed through an internal blog.

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