Whether you are part of a small company or a multinational behemoth, getting the right information to the right people at the right time is important. And blogs, combined with feeds, provide that type of framework. Of course, a blog is only as good as the information being put into it and that information is only as good as how it’s being put to use. So before you begin your blogging journey, ensure that you have an internal blogging strategy. With so much potential here, mismanaging it would tragic. Get excited. Encourage people. Find great new ways to use blogs. But make sure you do it because you want to improve your business, not just because blogs are new and exciting.

Developing a strategy is a three-part exercise: discovery, exploration, and excavation. The discovery phase of creating a successful blogging strategy is laying out your current challenges, your values, and your objectives as a company. Any blogging activity you take on needs to fit with these. Secondly, you need to explore: brainstorm new ideas, determine which of the ideas presented in this article work for you, and decide what types of activities you believe will make the best use of your resources. Finally, you need to excavate: do the work, get employees involved, get them motivated, help them save time and work, and generally make their lives easier, more fulfilling, and more exciting.

DISCOVERY

The discovery phase of any project is the most important part. What you create in this phase will determine not only the metrics for success, but also whether or not you’ll succeed in the first place. Too many companies skip over this phase, which is kind of like an architect ignoring the plan of a house and looking at lighting fixtures first. Planning never killed a project, but ignoring planning has laid waste to many great ideas. Your discovery phase should deal with several key points:

Challenges

Identifying the challenges facing your company is an important component of any new project. If something isn’t solving one of your challenges or meeting one of your objectives, why are you doing it? Your challenge as a company could be that your employees are being flooded by e-mail, that you aren’t generating enough new ideas, or that internal communication isn’t as effective as it could be.

Values

While most people wouldn’t add values as part of a project to-do list, I’m a big believer in everything that your company is doing emerging from your values, the dream you are proposing, or the promises you are making to yourself, your employees, and your customers. If your company doesn’t have a set of overriding values, promises, or dreams (and, no, a typical vision statement probably doesn’t cut it here), it’s entirely possible that you are floating in the marketing wind. Values provide stability, and they’re a great metric against which to test new projects and ideas. Your values, dreams, and promises might be that you love new ideas, that you will support employees’ dreams, and that you will be a market leader in your industry no matter what.

Objectives

Setting objectives for a project allows you to determine metrics for success. Without objectives, you’ll never know whether what you are doing is the best thing for the project. Your objectives must match to your values, and as such your objectives may be as simple as improving communication, giving employees the information they need when they need it, and helping to build healthy business relationships among employees and between employees and management.

Metrics for Success

Metrics typically map to your objectives. If your objective is to create new ideas, your metric for success might be that you’ve received at least 50 ideas during the year, that you’ve reviewed and provided feedback on all of them, and that you’ve acted on at least three of them. EXPLORATION The second phase in developing a successful blogging strategy is to . . . well, develop a blogging strategy. Discovery was all about setting the ground rules most companies need to do this only once, and then those values and challenges can be applied to any project. Having done that, you can now enter the three phases of exploration: expanding, contracting, and deciding. Expanding This is your brainstorming phase. Take a look at this article’s eight great ways to use blogs internally. Then look at Article 4’s big list and brainstorm ways that your company can use blogs. For some companies, this might be a small list, for others it could be longer than the master list in Article 4.

Contracting

Having expanded the possibilities for blogging at your company as much as you can, now is the time to match the possibilities to your values, challenges, and objectives. This may mean your list goes from 20 possibilities to 3 possibilities. Find the areas that will provide value to your company where it’s at right now. It’s okay if blogging doesn’t fit right now, because you can always redo this exercise every six months to see if things have changed.

Deciding

Having narrowed down the list, you need to decide which projects will be done and specifically what the metrics for success will be for each of those projects. At this point, you may want to look at proposing resources to be assigned to the project, and you may want to bring on a project manager and/or an employee champion.

EXCAVATION

Having decided what you’re going to do, the final phase of developing your blogging strategy is deciding how you’re going to do it. If you’re setting up an idea blog, will you allow anonymous posting or commenting, who will review the ideas suggested, and will you give feedback? If you’re doing official team blogs, how will you go about getting teams motivated to do this extra work? Will you create time in their schedules for this or is it just another task they need to take care of in their already busy schedules? No matter what you do, the excavation part of your project is a threephase part: buy-in, execution, and follow-up.

Buy-in

Because blogs are generally employee-driven affairs, you should get buy-in early on, as well as feedback. Launching new projects is difficult in any company, but trying to implement internal blogs from the top down probably won’t work. You can use a variety of tactics to get employees to embrace new blogs simply opening the door to choice or getting employee champions involved will help. The success of the project depends on how much buy-in and participation you get, so don’t discount this phase.

Execution

Launching the various blogs your company will be using can be a challenge. Will you start them all at once? Will teams be responsible for setting up and maintaining their own blogs, or will the IT department do it? Lots of questions must be answered, but thankfully actually installing blogs is largely an IT issue, and most blogging software packages are fairly simple to install and configure (for trained personnel). If you don’t have the internal resources to handle this, you may need to hire a blog consulting company or bring in general technical consultants. In fact, bringing in consultants with blogging experience, specifically blog consultants, often isn’t difficult, especially if they simply review and comment on your plans and do nothing else (many blog consulting companies have a set fee for this, which is fairly low).

Follow-up

For any good project, the worst thing you can do is never check to see how well it’s going, whether it’s matching up with your values, and whether the people who use the software are happy. Whether you conduct monthly reviews or weekly reviews, make sure you do a high-level evaluation of success on occasion, at least once a quarter. If you find that the venture is unsuccessful, you and your employees can determine how it needs to be fixed. Because internal blogging has such a huge amount of potential for most companies, it’s always sad when an internal blogging project fails because of lack of planning, poor execution, or a lack of follow-up. So do your homework, and treat your internal blogging project with the same respect with which you should treat your employees. After all, it’s most likely they who will be using the blogs on a daily basis, and if it doesn’t make their lives easier and better, it might not be worth doing.

WRAPPING IT UP

This article provides reasons to do internal blogging, offers some solid examples of ways that nearly any company could make use of internal blogging, and introduces some tools for you to use to set up and maintain a blog. This article closes the “how to get started with blogging” portion of this article. At this point, you should have a solid understanding blogging’s usefulness and how it can be applied internally and externally to grow your business, improve your relationships with customers, and increase your visibility among other things. In the next three articles, we’ll look at how to monitor what’s being said about you and your products, how to participate in your blog, and (the all-important) how to deal with negativity.