Corporate Blogging

Thoughts on the proper use of WebLog-s (Wiki) within the Corpor Ate/Enterprise environment...

The Team Is The Focus: the key unit of enterprise communication.

• Focus on tools that maximize benefit to the team (not fuzzy enterprise Knowledge Management - the Context is often too loose for Re Use)

• A team needs to build Coherence, and that requires (I believe) a shared team space (vs lots of personal spaces).

• Generating Insights (Bill French's term) happpens within a Context, and generates Context.

• Wiki manages team-level Context better than WebLog.

Plumbing: make sure tools are available securely from outside the FireWall. For most environments simple HTTP Basic Authentication is fine (but I'm not by-nature a Security freak).

Transparency will make latent cultural problems visible. Embrace that. What appears to be a crisis is just the end of an illusion.

• the "team" includes the Onsite Customer (at least the internal one).

• conflict is best reduced through human relations and communication, not through bureaucracy. See Agility Vs Conflict.

For enterprise/Intranet benefit, focus on

• Search Engine (Google Box)

• using tools that provide an RSS feed

• maybe a Portal tool (server-side RssAggregator)

  • should this include employee personal sites? see below

• maybe some traffic analysis (most popular pages across enterprise), link/referer analysis, etc.

Should company-run WebLog-s be used as a marketing communciation vehicle (Marketing Blog)?

• I think employees should be encouraged to maintain their Humanity at all times. Keeping a Human Voice in marcomm is just one part of this.

• But I think attempts to institutionalize this will backfire. The most important thing to women is sincerity - once you can fake that, you're in.

Employees should feel free to run personal WebLog-s, where they may talk about their work and other things. (Personal Vs Team Writing)

• I think these should be treated as hobbies

• They should be hosted off-site. Employees should not be reimbursed for software, hosting fees, etc.

• No "official" corporate site should point to employee offsite blogs (unless perhaps deep within a community-interaction area, if such blogs contain relevant content, and then they should be mixed in with non-employee equivalent blogs).

• You should have a corporate policy similar to the one at Groove to set some basic guidelines.

• but every Free Agent should have his own person WikiLog..

  • portions of which might be relevant to his "job", and which might be read and commented on by his co-workers, in contexts that are not proprietary/operational (e.g. commenting on external news/ideas, relatively abstract discussions, etc.)

Case Study From Lucent --2003/09/17 17:51 GMT
you might be interested: http://studioid.com/pg/blogging_in_corporate_america.php