Corporate blogs are very strong communication and information sharing tools in a corporate community and they are thought provocative.
Generally, anyone can write comments to any post in corporate blogs. Anyone can write a comment to any comment or simply anyone can write a new post, in internal blogs. Internal blogs are in many cases good alternatives of the meetings. People may not have frequent meetings, about many important matters, because of two simple reasons:
- distance of the meeting location and
- availability of all the people at the proposed meeting time.
However the way community members communicate and share information in a blog environment, creates practically many number of small or large virtual meetings that community members can participate at any time of the day (or night).
Since blogs are open to the community, the hurdle and hesitation of sending invitations to the exact/correct number of related people is removed. Consequently fewer people will feel that they are kept away from the decision making process. Since every post is open to the community, anyone can take part in the decision making process, simply by adding his/her comments.
A talking community creates the healthiest environment in the decision making process with collective intelligence of the elite crowd.
Blogs, in many cases, are more practical in use than emails.
Emails are not the best corporate communication and information sharing tools, since
- people receive too many of them and
- people are not always good enough in archiving their emails, therefore they may not find some of them, later when they need them again.
- In many big organizations there are at least a few but mostly many internal blogs on their intranet, according to the aim or target of the blog.
Blogs are used at every level of the organization. A good example may be the participation of the production workers with the improvement proposals, using the network connected kiosk around the production area, in some organizations. In such organizations, any other people can make a comment on the proposal and the improvement action is triggered automatically without the hierarchical vertical confirmation process.
Even if the made proposal is not applicable for some reasons, it may still inspire some other members in the crowd for more practical solutions.
Posts and comments are very easy to reach and follow. All the new browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE7 support the technology called RSS. RSS technology, with just one click, helps the readers to create a button which enable them to see some number of last posts in a small window, without the need to visit the URL of the blog. RSS is very useful especially when the posts are sent less frequent than visits potentially readers can make. Then the readers are simply informed if there are new posts, or not, without visiting the blog.
Automatic archiving and recalling of the past posts may be much faster than past emails. Emails are kept in the tree of directories. If an email is archived in a low level directory and if the directory is named different than the senders or receivers name, it may require making a special search to find it. However blogs use tags instead of directories. It is recommended to attach more than one tag to each post, for the future ease of finding.
For example; there can be a post about innovative marketing approach to increase the truck sales in Turkey.
If such a post is tagged with the words innovation, marketing, truck and Turkey then it can easily be found anytime in the future under the posts listed with any of these tags or may be much faster if the posts with the tag combinations like innovation-marketing or truck-Turkey are listed.
Some companies create their own internal taxonomy but this may not be even necessary since each new tag is automatically put into the tag cloud and members generally prefer to use the pre-created tags, rather than creating a similar new tag.
Some benefits of internal blogs can be listed as:
- It improves participation spirit, collaboration, and the capabilities of team learning. It is ideal to run projects and to work with heterogeneous teams. It is also useful to promote dialogue and find lateral ideas outside the team.
- It allows integrating conversations with a shared vision. It is an excellent means for the leaders to communicate.
- It is the space where interpretations and different points of view come up so that the any member of the organization can discuss and debate them.
- It is an excellent means for the employees to achieve an integrated vision of the company by joining in conversations.
- It implies an open communication platform that allows new ways relating and coordinating actions among the organizational members and between the latter and the network of external relationships.
- It becomes the written memory of the organization. Furthermore, writing conveys emotional stability which eventually promotes the process of organizational development.
- They speed up the transference and transformation of knowledge to make ideas flow easily and take learning into action
Note: The text and materials have been gathered from Wikipedia, BusinessWeek and RedHerring. We can proudly say that Boz Zashev and George Athannassov participated in the wikipedia text edits in blogging resource definitions as well.
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