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This week's BusinessWeek Online small business column, Features Toby Bloomberg, yours truly, and Teresa Valdez Klein of Blog Business Summit with advice for small businesses on internal blogs.
In thinking about the biggest changes internal blogs bring to organizations, I brought up the challenges of flipping the traditional corporate communication methods upside down, which is what blogs do. Agreeing to let opinions and ideas and collaboration bubble up from the mid-section of the organization, rather than as edicts from on high, requires a conscious change in corporate culture.
"TALKING SPACE." ...because blogs are bottom-up in nature, they sometimes require a change in thinking about employee communications, says Jeneane Sessum, a social media consultant based in Atlanta. The traditional top-down communication approach, where the CEO or HR manager pushes policies and procedures out to employees, can be subverted by an internal blog, which is communal by nature.
An employee [[should be "internal blog can"]] blog will serve more as a "...centralized talking space for company news and views, customer wins, etc.," Sessum explains. "Blogs put the nexus of control, at least from a communication standpoint, in the hands of employees, thereby empowering them. At the same time, because internal blogs remain within the firewall, they are a good venue for honest communication and collaboration in a relatively safe environment for businesses that are just getting used to the idea of blogging and may view it as sort of renegade."
Toby Bloomberg encourages small businesses to look at collaborative and team building possibilities of internal blogs, but also warns that executive sponsorship of -- and even participation in -- blog-related activities has to happen in order for employees to feel it's valuable and proper to run with the idea of blogging.
"The lines of communication between departments can be difficult to maneuver. Blogs can be a means to easily share information that might not be perceived as relevant to one department, but critical to another. An added benefit is that informal team-building occurs naturally. There is ongoing personal communication, so people begin to know and understand folks from areas of the company they might not have had a lot of contact with."
Bloomberg adds a word of caution: "Although it's not a top-down strategy, unless management and the company culture support this type of informal communication it is set to fail before the first word is posted. It's critical that the company provide training and encouragement, especially in the beginning stages."
Tags: BusinessWeek Online, Business Blogging, Blogs, Corporate Blogging, Tech, Web2.0, Toby Bloomberg, Teresa Valdez Klein = Powered by Qumana
