Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog

Intranet blogging (see earlier 21Publish whitepaper here [PDF file]) seems to be gaining momentum by companies that are looking to imbue and discuss culture in private settings. In a prior post, I mentioned how a major US bank is using blogs by 21Publish to discuss leadership and company culture.

Today, I learned from Shel Holtz's blog that McDonald's now has an intranet blog. According to Shel, Steve Wilson, the burger company’s senior director of web communications, addressed a crowd at Blog On:

"If your task is to move the culture of a company, you’re not going to move it by the flip of a switch,” Wilson said. “You have to show that an open dialogue can occur, and create an ongoing dialogue to move from point A to point B."

Culture change is something that I've not heard explicitly discussed in mainstream corporate settings since the mid 90s, but it seems to be coming back into vogue. Blogs could be the internal desktop memo of days past.

Other very recent news in the blog intranet space ... the NewPR Wiki just started a CEO Intranet Blogs list.

CorporateBlogging.Info also has a very recent post on using intranet blogs for knowledge management in a corporation. Just last week I had a discussion with a major telecom company about using blogs in the context of KM. Perfect use-case just coming of age. I suspect it has to do in part with the fact that blogging has been legitimized if only for the medium's impact in organizing discussions more effectively than email. Additionally, some companies just aren't ready organizationally (culturally) to handle the external messaging aspects of blogging, but they are more than ready to try things in a private/secure environment.

To change gears a bit, some things we have found at 21Publish is that customers like the ability to have hosted blogging intranets that support the following:

• dedicated server integrated with company's specific firewall considerations
• workflows restricted by blog community manager to prevent confidential posts from going public
• shared server, secure blog intranet (not custom integrated with organization's firewall)
• restricted admin of reader groups
• traceable conversations and comment tracking within the community
• automated sign-up and administration of bloggers with varying levels of control and which permit registrations only from certain domain names (e.g., companyxyz.com).

So I am seeing more momentum on intranet blogging than I have seen in the past. What are you seeing?

Technorati Tags: intranets, blogs, blogcommunity, blog