Blogging Is Big
I've shared with clients this prediction: By the end of 2005, any organization that really appreciates internal communication as a strategic business function will have figured out how to use weblogs to increase communication effectiveness. In fact--and as this article in the latest Fast Company attests--many respected companies are already there.
The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year. Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren't overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they're a bottoms-up approach to communication. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more," says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review . "Even better, you understand them faster."As the article goes on to describe, blogs' informal, "inherently open, [and] anarchic nature" make many companies nervous. These companies, I believe, have their heads in sand. Here's why:
In every organization, there is already lots of informal communication occurring (via water cooler conversations, small group meetings, emails, etc.). And we know that employees usually attribute greater credibility to information obtained from informal channels than from formal communications (e.g., town halls, intranet content, company newsletters, etc.). In fact, the corporate scandals of recent years have only exacerbated employees' distrust of formal communications "propaganda" and increased their reliance on informal networks to tell them "what's really going on in the company right now."
Right now, most organizations have little ability to monitor or in any way manage the communication that's currently occurring through informal networks. That's a problem, because much of the information that travels through informal networks doesn't reflect the facts. By equipping employees with the ability to use weblogs, organizations can migrate some of the informal communication that is already occurring to a highly transparent medium. As a result, organizations can more easily monitor and respond to "what people are really saying."