HOW TO USE BLOGS INTERNALLY

You can use blogs internally in a variety of ways. Instead of simply listing all of them, I’ll show the top eight ways your company can use internal blogs. This list should stir up some thoughts about ways that you can leverage the low-cost, high-adoption technology that blogging can be. You can blog internally for

• Project management communication

• Internal communication and marketing

• Idea generation and vetting

• Employee involvement and connection

• Team and project communication with the entire organization

• Internal team and project communication

• Administrative communication

• Dynamic team creation

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project management is all about ensuring that people stay informed and motivated while also staying on deadline. Project management tasks fail for lack of information and lack of communication. Project management blogs strive to achieve four goals:

• Keep everyone informed on the project’s progress.

• Archive important documents.

• Raise discussion points.

• Involve all members of the project team.

Because project management is inherently decision-making based on information, project management blogs allow the project manager and the team to communicate back and forth. Some project management blogs are completely open, allowing anyone on the team to post and comment. These are often strong ways of ensuring that the project is pushing forward while encouraging contributions from anyone and everyone involved. Some companies who use blogs for project management simply don’t need a project manager because the team completely owns the process and reaps the full reward for success.

In teams large or small, document management can be one of the most difficult aspects of project management. Finding out who has the most up-to-date copy of an important document, who is working on which document, and who each document has to go to can be difficult to track, even with advanced project management software. Project management blogs can be set up to allow people to contribute to documents in an organized manner.

An example of an externally based project management system that uses blogs is Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com). For a low monthly fee (or even for free), team members can post messages, share documents, maintain to-do lists, and set project milestones. Most successful project management blogs, whether they’re externally or internally run, will allow at least these basic project management features.

A strong feature of project management blogs is their ability to raise discussion points. This is accomplished by putting up a post that asks for feedback. These discussion points–based posts can often alleviate the need for a meeting, a series of e-mail exchanges, or a conference call.

Finally, using a blog for project management is participatory. It ensures that everyone has ownership of the process and allows everyone to contribute. A well-oiled project management blog should be low maintenance and highly effective. A number of solutions are available for project management, but using even a simple solution such as Movable Type (www.sixapart.com) or WordPress (www.wordpress.org) can work well for motivated teams.

INTERNAL COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Internal communication at any sized company can be difficult. For most small companies, it may not be too difficult to do, but sometimes even small companies want something more permanent than e-mail.

E-mail is one of the greatest communication advances in recent memory, but it is also one of the most difficult to maintain. Between spam, scams, and general information overload, e-mail can often be more trouble than it’s worth. Yet for most companies it is still one of the best ways to communicate, get input, and gather consensus. E-mail is used to call meetings, review documents, announce new projects, and post new jobs internally. Blogs have several advantages over e-mail in the communications spectrum:

• Anyone can contribute.

• Anyone can comment and their comments can be seen by everyone.

• All posts are archived indefinitely.

• Blog posts are categorized for ease of viewing.

• Past posts can be searched quickly and easily.

Blogs are a powerful internal communications tool for a variety of purposes. While internal blogs may not supplant e-mail as the king of corporate communication, they are definitely finding their place in the royal family. Some great uses for blogs internally are for project sites, new project announcements, recruiting, and as a way to filter down official company news and information from executives. One other great use for an internal blog is as an industry aggregator blog. (We talked about aggregation blogs in Article 5.) An internal aggregator blog is a fantastic way to keep your employees informed on what is happening in the industry. In fact, each of these areas offers a great amount of freedom, and the software to power each of these can be as inexpensive as $500. Starting a new blog can actually be as simple as downloading and setting up WordPress (www.wordpress.org) or Community Server (www.communityserver.org) software, both of which are completely free to download. The power of internal communications blogs comes from their archived nature and their searchability by keyword or date along with a number of other benefits. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working at Microsoft or Aunt Minnie’s Bakery, having a permanent blog location for official correspondence, industry news, company matters, new jobs, projects, and products can be an inexpensive and effective way to get news. In addition, because blogs are web-based, they ensure that even people who are away for a few days can quickly catch up on what happened while they were out.

IDEAS MATTER

One of the challenges facing today’s companies is staying relevant and/or ahead of the curve and generating enough new ideas to keep the business profitable and on the forefront of the industry. Most companies realize that if they could get their employees’ ideas out of their heads, the company would be able to accomplish much, much more. Some companies offer significant incentives for new ideas (such as profit sharing); others simply have a suggestions box and encourage employees to use it. No matter what your level of commitment to employee-generated ideas, it’s hard to argue with the fact that 200 heads are better than 2. It goes without saying that no ideas system will work unless you actually value the feedback employees provide. One of the best ways to do that is to acknowledge new ideas, and, if you decide not to go with them, to say honestly why you aren’t using that feedback right now.

For most companies, the most difficult part isn’t really what to do with great ideas after they’re submitted, it’s finding great ideas in the first place. And while a suggestion box can be helpful, and incentives are great ways to reward free-thinking employees, the real challenge is in taking an idea from its original state to something that can actually be created or accomplished. This is one of the reasons that idea blogs are taking off internally at companies: they allow anyone to contribute to an idea and then allow anyone else to comment on the idea, refining it from its original proposal. Much like having employees submit new ideas can improve your business, so, too, can having employees refine other ideas.

Some companies even go so far as to air new ideas that are proposed at the executive level through idea blogs to see if anyone can spot holes in the plans. I know of a Canadian fabric company that ended up dismissing an entire product line because the factory manager was able to spot a production difficulty with a new idea. Thanks to his observations, the only cost to the company was the time lost in meetings. Successful idea blogs share several common characteristics:

• Anyone can contribute (anonymously if they so desire).

• Anyone can comment (again, anonymously if they want).

• All ideas get reviewed and responded to at the senior level.

• Great ideas get picked, and employees get rewards for their ideas (profit sharing and cost savings bonuses being great rewards).

• Everyone is equal.

A great idea blog may not be enough to save your company, but then it doesn’t exactly cost you much to start up such a simple blog. Plus, an idea blog can be a great way to communicate to

employees that you value their ideas and, by extension, that you value them.