Management By Blog?
from the nothing-wrong-with-that... dept
Jimmy Guterman's latest column is looking at the issue of how corporations are using blogging. Nothing earth shattering here: many companies are pretty cautious about jumping into the blogging world. A few are experimenting with outbound blogs, to communicate with customers (or potential customers). A few are experimenting with internal blogs, mostly for knowledge or project management. However, a command from upper management to "start blogging now" doesn't seem to work (nor should it). What we've found with Techdirt Corporate Intelligence's enterprise blogs (where we do the blogging for our clients, making sure they have the daily news and analysis they need every day) is that companies like our approach to knowledge management because we're the ones supplying the knowledge. When companies ask their own employees to start dumping knowledge into a blog - they hesitate. Not everyone is a "writer". Not everyone likes to express what's in their head. So, having a dedicated staff (such as those of us at Techdirt) supplying the information for you seems to work much better than setting up internal blogs for employees to fill themselves. That's not to say there isn't a space for employee-owned blogs - but they're clearly not for everyone.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Missing quotes
We attempted to place a BLOG in our corporate intranet. The major complaint that lead to it's demise was lack of time. Many people were willing to add their specific mental knowledge base but were already pressed for time with deadlines.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The problem with blogs from a communications persp
There are several reasons why corporate blogging by employees are the wrong strategy (in no particular order)
1) I would say the majority of the best managers I've worked for are mediocre writers at best; it's not where their strengths lie, it surely doesn't come easy to them, and they don't have much motivation to do so. Their emails are the shortest out there, and often devoid of "personalty" (which makes this publication, and others like it, enjoyable) And if its not enjoyable, ultimately it won't be read.
2) People are overworked as it is. Try adding any new project to anyone...particularly the managers or people with the most knowledge; they're already pulling 60 hour weeks...
3) Informal writing can be dangerous to a company's health. Writing like I'm doing here - it doesn't stand up either professionally or legally. Anything you publish can end up in the hands of the competition, or as mentioned above, on the Internet. All it takes is one tired or frustrated employee to make a knock on the competition or about a troublesome customer to end up embarrassing the company and costing a lot more in PR work to cover it.
4) Employees meant to read the blogs are overworked. They're expected to keep up on what's happening in their dept., their workgroup, the company as a whole. Now add in a daily stream of tidbits? This helps productivity how?
5) This is a Big One - the more communications that bombard an employee, the weaker the overall message AND the weaker the retention rate. Trust me, everyone studies this. Our particular company shortened their company-wide communications to 3 per week, delivered personally BY your local manager, in two minutes or less. Things posted up, or handed out were NOT read, or if they were read they were NOT retained. Add another stream of constant "babble", and at the best you get diminishing returns.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]