Listening to customers’ blogs is obviously an important part of growing your business, because it gives you a window into what they think about your company. It creates real passion and understanding. Employee blogs are similar. In “Why Internal Blogging Rocks,” Suw Charman, a renowned British expert on internal blogging, lays out some of the main reasons that internal blogs are critical to your company’s success.

WHY INTERNAL BLOGGING ROCKS! by Suw Charman

The best software bends to your will. It fits in with the way you work, rather than making you change your behavior to suit it. This is where so many big, lumbering knowledge management (KM) and content management systems (CMS) fall over: they force the user to behave in a way that is unnatural and uncomfortable, and anyone who’s coerced into using them will stop just as soon as they think they can get away with it. Blogs, on the other hand, are inherently flexible. You can have one blog with one author and open access, or multiple blogs with multiple authors and a complex access permissions system.

Whatever you want, you will find software that either just works or that you can hack into exactly as you want. Fast and simple to implement, blogs don’t require a huge IT budget. Even the most expensive of blogging solutions is a fraction of the cost of traditional KM and CMS platforms, so you can toy with them and if they don’t work you can just toss them out. They’re easy to use, too: there’s no 300-page user manual or three-day residential course to go on. If you can surf the Web, you can use a blog. Blogs are suitable for almost any purpose for example, event logging, cross-shift communications, team building, project management, knowledge sharing, and business conversations. Any scenario in which individuals need to share what they know, discuss problems, and make new connections with other individuals can benefit from a blog. Flexibility. Simplicity. Ease of implementation. Cost effectiveness. Just a few reasons why internal blogging rocks.

As with any large project, launching internal blogs in a company can be a challenge and getting people to adopt, read, and communicate using them can be even more challenging. Following is a series of rules, guidelines, and advice on how to create a successful internal blogging platform, as well as how to get it properly adopted. The first step is to reach out to your employees: the more they own the concept of blogging, the better. You don’t even need to call this blogging. Unless your organization is already pro-blog, you can just as easily use a more organization- specific name. Several of the companies I’ve worked with in the past have simply called their blogging platform myCompany (where Company is the company name). This has given the employees ownership over the blog and has also allowed the company to build the features of the blogging platform around individual employees.

GETTING EMPLOYEES INVOLVED

After you reach out to your employees for feedback, you will likely want to bring on a select group of employees as part of the planning process. These people will go back to their groups or departments and evangelize for the new offering, as well as ensuring that the new internal blogging platform addresses their needs as employees. The goal here is to provide value to the individual employees, to empower the individual employees, and to make finding other similarly minded employees easy. The most successful internal blogging platforms have the following three properties in common:

• They bring value to the individual.

If there is no value for the individual employee, there will be no blog posts. And no blog posts means no value for anyone.

• They make finding other similar-minded individuals easy.

Some companies facilitate this via a unified category system or by asking employees to create a list of interests (much like today’s social networking services such as LinkedIn, www .linkedin.com). Others do this via an internal blog-focused search engine. The easier it is for employees to find each other, the more connections will be made.

• They make it easy to read, browse, and subscribe to the blogs.

“Find similar blogs” and “Find comments by this author” are great features to allow people to find others with whom they agree. As in the wider world of blogging, connections that are made are often more abstract than just “I’m an engineer, and that guy’s an engineer so we should connect.” People will connect based on personality more often than career. Ensure that as you roll out your internal blogging system, you don’t make it restrictive. The more control the individual employee has, the better. While some managers will fear that employees will use the blogs for frivolous things, if you’ve hired smart people, they will use the technology wisely and efficiently especially if everyone in the company can read it. Much as in the real-world blogging community, the price for being a fool is having everyone laugh at you and not in a good way! Some companies have set up project-specific and process-specific blogs, and anyone can contribute to these blogs, as opposed to having individual blogs. The more relevant to employees’ jobs and interests the non-individual blogs are, the more they will be read and therefore the more valuable they will be. If you encourage employees to blog, you need to give them time to blog.

The last thing employees want is to feel like they are stealing time away from other projects while blogging. Ensure that employees and managers know that blogging is part of the job and that it is highly encouraged. This doesn’t mean that employees can blog for eight hours a day, but it does mean that it needs to become part of their daily workload. Encourage employees to be responsible in their blogging, and that their blog and the other company blogs are an extension of their responsibilities, not a replacement. Be as open as possible, and talk about it with employees or employee advocates.

TIPS FOR BLOGGING SUCCESS

Encourage employees to comment. Comments create communities and trust and spread knowledge even more freely than blog posts. The more employees believe that they own their blog, their ideas, and their micro-community, the better. Be aware that blogging may involve or be a catalyst for cultural change, and know that some people will be threatened by that idea. Ensure you have a process in place not only to address people’s concerns, but also to improve the blogging offering. It’s unlikely you’ll get it right the first time. Start simple. As illustrated in the examples of Disney and GM, large success doesn’t require large plans. The simpler the solution, the more easily employees can see how it benefits them and their jobs. Organic growth is the best kind for any type of community or knowledge-based initiative. Finally, have a purpose. Don’t start blogging because blogging is cool, hip, or makes you more stylish. Have specific goals attached to the internal project, such as “to help employees connect more easily,” or “to create an online knowledge repository for the future,” or even “to generate new ideas.” You can then revisit the new platform every few months and see how well it is succeeding at these goals and learn what you can do to help it along. Your internal blogging needs to grow organically, but it also needs to be ready to change organically.

WRAPPING IT UP

In this article, we looked briefly at how to use blogs and a few examples of prominent companies making innovative use of blogs. Ultimately, the options for how to use blogs are limitless. The key is to decide where your business is going and then figure out whether blogs are the right tool to get you there. In the next two articles, we’ll look at the top ways blogs can be used internally and externally and more examples of companies that are using each of the techniques. Hopefully, these will stir up some thought for how your business could make use of blogs, and even for how you could push the envelope of what is possible in the world of blogging.

WHAT TYPE OF BLOGS ARE BEST FOR YOUR COMPANY

T his article provides a framework to help you understand and remember the top seven ways you can use blogs to market your business, create relationships, and create positive experiences for your customers. Some blogs will require that you use a mixture of these methodologies, while others will employ only one of these seven basic blog types. No matter; as long as your business is getting value from your blog, you’re succeeding.

EXTERNAL BLOGGING PERSONALITY TYPES

Instead of providing a dry list of the top ways you can use blogs, I’ve decided to look at blogging in a different way. I have taken the top seven types of business blogs and personified them as different characters, or locations, within a city. Let’s take a tour of this virtual city and visit some people and places your business may want to work with as it discovers, experiments with, and eventually embraces blogging:

• The Barber Barbers can prove to be prominent citizens they know the right people, have lots of wisdom from years of listening to customers, and have no problem sharing that wisdom. In some ways, a barber serves as a pundit or analyst, or perhaps an adviser. The barber deserves to be heard not only because she sees things differently, but often because she’s right.

• The Blacksmith The blacksmith is like the barber in that he knows the industry, except he is typically inside a company and is thus hammering industry and opinion through the company forge. Software developers at IBM, Sun, and other large technology companies fulfill this role as they bring their experience to bear on a problem.

• The Bridge A bridge blogger is a person who makes connections, influences, and helps bring people together. She is obsessed with relationships and connecting people, and as a result she can often function as a peacekeeper. In a corporate setting, the public relations professional may be a natural bridge blogger or it could just as easily be the company secretary.

• The Window A window blogger is similar to a blacksmith blogger in that he typically works inside a company and uses his experience to frame his opinions. The difference between the two types, though, is that a blacksmith blogger typically talks about things inside the company, while a window blogger typically talks about things inside and outside the company.

• The Signpost A signpost blogger in unusual in that she typically doesn’t share her opinions at least that isn’t the primary reason for her blog’s existence. A signpost blogger points out cool things of interest in her industry. She may not have much to say in each post (maybe only a few words describing a topic of interest), but she may post dozens of short notes per day as she comes across interesting tidbits, perhaps pointing readers to information at other sites.

• The Pub Pub bloggers create discussions designed to bring in people from all spectrums of a particular issue to talk something through and have a laugh at themselves or others in the process. Peter Davidson’s blog is a solid pub blog example; “Thinking by Peter Davidson” (http://peterthink .blogs.com/thinking), allows a group of likeminded thinkers to explore a variety of issues.

• The Newspaper A newspaper blogger functions in many ways like a journalist attempting to do more reporting than opining, she does her best to stick to the facts. Many political blogs are newspaper-ish in nature, as are a few technical blogs, such as Engadget (www.engadget.com ), which focuses on the latest “gadgety” news.

A single blog may often include characteristics of several of these types; however, because blogs are generally written by one blogger or a small group of bloggers, you can often see an overriding trend as to what type of blogger is at work.

Mixed in with these broad areas are other types of blogs that make up the blogospherical town the post office, where people go for a large variety of information; the town hall, where important decisions are made; and all sorts of other oddities. A healthy town needs all types of citizens and places, and there are certainly more than enough uses for blogs to go around. Some unique mixtures of blog types include Dave Pollard’s “How to Save the World” (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007), which is much like a coffee shop for likeminded people to gather and discuss topics; the “New Communications Blogzine” (www.newcommblogzine .com), which provides monthly insights from marketing and communications leaders; and “Doc Searls Weblog” (http://doc.weblogs.com ), where Doc not only shares his opinions, but frames them with dozens of other opinions from the blogosphere.