In my last post ‘How to improve communications using collaborative tools‘ I gave my view on the corporate environment needed to encourage internal communications professionals to welcome collaboration tools being used by employees. I also gave examples of collaboration tools that can help improve internal communications. This post covers how blogs can help improve internal communications.
A corporate blogging tool can help employees share ideas and opinions. It’s not just used to comment upon internal communications. Blog posts can also help employees doing similar work or having a similar interest in different business units to save time and effort. Employees can find someone else’s views who they do not know to help them solve a problem or speed up a task.
And blogs are something employees are becoming more familiar with on the internet and expect to see on their intranet. For example in the UK many of the BBC reporters blog what they report on TV and radio. There are also many bloggers who post on subjects of interest to employees, whether work-related or of personal interest.
The main point for internal communicators to understand is blogs are established, accepted, and understood on the internet by the same people, employees, who are the audience within an organisation who receive news. So, I recommend a few points internal communicators consider:
- Be accepting of this changing environment and welcome it as some progressive internal communicators have done successfully.
- Don’t feel threatened and react negatively by asking for posts with different views to be removed.
- Widen your scope to include blogs in your communications planning.
- You communicate the corporate message but it is not the only message that can be communicated.
- Treat employees as people with opinions and views they have a right to express, be listened and responded to constructively.
- Take a wider, more strategic view, of all communications and communicators.
- Engage with bloggers and comment on their posts and explain your point of view.
- Posts on blogs can act as an early warning device of a small problem to be resolved before it becomes a much larger and difficult problem to resolve later.
- Posting and commenting on blogs increases employees’ engagement. If they didn’t care, why would they blog?
- Blog posts should help shape corporate values and future direction.
Contact me to find out how I can help you:
- implement a blogging tool
- have the right terms and conditions of use
- communicate better using collaborative tools
- improve engagement of employees
- measure the benefits to be gained
If you want further help from me please contact me or find out more about me and what I can offer.
My next post in this series will be on discussion forums.
Tags: blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, governance, intranet, social media, value
Given people’s familiarity with blogs, I’m surprised not more executives and employees are blogging internally. Not only does it facilitate communication, but it can also be good for one’s career, as I’ve pointed out here: http://www.vialect.com/internal-blogging-benefits-career
Honestly i really don’t know how blog can improve internal communication,but i heard a lot of it,When i was in Finland internal communication is really effective in social media but never been do in blog.Anyway thanks for it.
Pingback: Enterprise 2.0: Increasing Communication through Blogging Internally « Sukshan Sakdsrinarang