Corporate Blogging

Nick Wreden’s 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis points to Blogging in Corporate America, which provides a download of Michael Angeles’ presentation on using weblogs on the intranet and how to make them useful for knowledge management. It also includes a brief history of Web publishing.

I believe my team would benefit greatly from a blog or wiki because we create massive amounts of documentation. It’s painful to find, manage, and use through Windows explorer. Our department is moving to Panagon for use as the library (or KM system) for housing our projects and processes.

I’ve played with many different CMSes and it is not one of the easier ones to use from what I’ve seen to date. However, it’s holding documents used by over 5,000 people. Can’t say how many CMSes would meet the demand of a large audience located around the USA and on many different servers.

Ironically, a co-worker forwarded me the links to two Web sites for updates on union contract negotiations that are currently underway. One is in weblog-style and it’s tastefully done. It doesn’t have the “emotional” wording typically used when writing about such a topic.

Corporate blogging is going to grow and become as commonplace as having Word and PowerPoint loaded on our PCs. They might not be called blogs, but the concept is similar and they will be used for:

• brainstorming
• creating, editing, and approving docs
• status reports / updates
• doc library
• staying connected with customers / clients
• marketing and news updates to public
• … and on and on.

However, corporate blogging won’t succeed without participation just like meetings don’t go well when the right players don’t attend.