Information is a key resource in a company. An important part in internal communications is ensuring that the process of gathering, storing and spreading information is done automatically, or at least as easily as possible.

However, a study undertaken by Accenture in June 2007 and released on eMarketer showed that information is poorly distributed among employees of a company.

New technologies offer a large number of new tools to communicate. The term blog stands for weblog and is usually used to provide commentaries or news on a particular topic. Blogs (and wikis) are somewhat like web sites, where the owner of the blog can post comments, articles, links to other pages on the net or from local resources. Some blogs also allow the owner to delegate privileges to others, allowing remote visitors to add, edit (optionally) or enhance the information without any proficiency in HTML. It has since become a formidable tool in the corporate toolbox.

Today external blogs –blogs accessible to everyone- are widely used by companies for promotional use, customer satisfaction and feedback, product development… However another type of blogs named internal business blogs –blogs accessible only to company members or whoever is authorised – are designed to improve communication within employees of an organization.

After, browsing the corporate blogosphere, I found that a Swedish web communication advisor has classified internal corporate blogs into 3 different categories:

Knowledge Blogs:

·Purpose: To give employees information and insights relating to their works assignments.

·Blogger: The organisation itself through one or more designated bloggers, or potentially all employees.

·Target groups: all employees with a certain interest.

Culture Blogs:

·Purpose: To strengthen organisational culture. Typically through informal content of social or non-work related character.

·Blogger: The organisation itself through one or more designated bloggers, or potentially all employees.

·Target groups: All employees as employees, and not as professionals (developers, managers, assistants and so on)

Collaboration Blogs:

·Purpose: To provide a working team with a tool for research, collaboration and discussion

·Blogger: The team

·Target groups: The team

Using blogs for internal communication is a fast growing area and has come to complement to email, intranet, internet, videoconferencing and other technologies.

I will here concentrate on the collaboration blogs type that allow people from a team to collaborate on a project. As identified by Mark White – Blog Consultant from BetterBusinessblogging.com- teams have the following requirements:

- Good communications between its members;

- The ability for all members to participate fully;

- Easy collaboration across the team;

- Dissemination of the results;

- A permanent record of the information, results and conclusions.

Some benefits of internal blogging:

The following points are some of the benefits a blog can offer:

Information distribution: Information is available instantly and across the entire company or restricted members of a project. The blog can be easily categorised by project teams, departments, cross functional teams, product development teams and so on… The search facility makes retrieval quick and simple to every user;

Information sharing: Users can directly look for the wanted information on the blog page or can also set up a web feed through a RSS technology, which enables readers to easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog.

Information accessibility: The internal blog is accessible through the browser and costs to implement such a blog are low. Employees can access the internal blog from everywhere, coffee place, home, during a business trip….

Information updating: The blog can be updated by anyone with access in the company which make it easy to add new information. People are more and more used to “Word” type document and therefore the interface of the blog will make it simple to use and update.

Single source of information: Whether it is departmental information, company information, project details, competitor analysis or any other type of information, having it all in one place makes it that much easier to keep up to date and relevant;

Information storage (easily located): The information will be stored in one place and available to everyone. Whenever an employee leaves the company, information stored on the blog will still be available and not anymore locked and wasted in their PCs.

Decrease in use of emails: Members of a team would not be overloaded with emails anymore as all information would be available and gathered on one blog. It would also allow the team to raise some issues and discuss ideas.

Promote discussion: Blog members, especially, junior members would participate more freely in the discussion as it would be regarded as a contribution to the blog and not as a direct question to a senior member.

The role of a blog as a collaboration tool is primarily to have a medium where people from a same team can exchange their ideas, build their ideas from comments of other members and come up with great solutions.

A collaborative blog could therefore in this case be compared to emails. Emails are made to communicate from one person to many other persons but when you want to communicate ‘many to many’, it becomes a lot more complicated. Blogs gives you the opportunity to do it quite easily.

However, for the blog to be an effective tool of communication, it needs to be updated quite often so people keep coming to have a look at the blog for the latest update of their project. However, like every new technology, people can be at first confused and reluctant to use the blog. That’s the reason why, at the beginning of implementing a blog, the team manager should be responsible for implementing it and communicating with its team to help them use it.

A training should be conducted to every members of the team so they feel comfortable with it. A good way of introducing the technology and members of the team would as seen on Jive, a software company providing tools for internal business blogs, would be to create a section where each member would introduce themselves and talk about their first week, month or year.

The latter webpage on Jive presents other ways of using your blog as a collaboration tool such as replacing it for meeting notes where everyone could be contributing if anything was missed out in the summary, or use it as a status report to update every one on their goals of the week

Blogs can replace emails or videoconferencing or be a complement to this technology. This will depend on the use you want and how people on your team are receptive to the different tools. However, blogs will allow keeping trace of your meeting in the same place as all your other thoughts and projects.

Here are a following list of links to blog and website that can give you a clearer idea on the use and benefits of internal blogs.

Betterbusinessblogging is a comprehensive website that will give you some really useful advices on benefits of the use of internal blogs for project teams as well as some reflexions on how to start and step up your own business blog.

Blogs benefits and use of blogs by teams

Information sharing and internal blogs

Starting a blog

Writing a blog

An interesting article from Matias Fernandez Duttom, a PR strategist and management consultant, specializing in social technologies:

Internal blogs: How to design powerful conversations that open possibilities for action and collaboration within blogs

Charlene Li from the Forrester Reseach Company has written a comprehensive document on best guide lines to start your business blogs.

Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal?

An example of guidelines by the Thomas Nelson Company

Thomas Nelson Blogging Guidelines

An interesting article published on December 22, 2004 by the Financial Times giving some example about internal blog can be found in the library database and some extracts can be found through the following link:

FT highlights example of blogs for internal communication

A useful review of 7 blogging tools for business blogs:

Seven Blogging Tools Reviewed

The following websites are companies providing enterprise solution for internal business blogs:

http://www.sixapart.com/

http://www.jivesoftware.com/

Some hosted blog solutions
www.wordpress.com
www.typepad.com
www.blogger.com