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?
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