Internal Blogs

There has been a lot written about this (including by me), and yet again, I find more being written about it. The point, however, is ... People are missing the point. Agreed ... Blogs are a great way to market ... Its a great tool available to marketeers to reach consumers or consumer groups like never before, or to PR execs making sure the company's point of view is stated clearly in the blogosphere somewhere. But, does that mean that this is all there is to blogging? I think not. Can we not have internal blogs as a tool which can be used for simple collaboration?

If there are Service Engineers geographically distributed, can they not benefit from the concept of blogs about their specific area of technology? Can not the folks from Finance host a blog where they could discuss SOX? Bottomline ... I think there is a lot more to blogs than just marketing ... Though, I do agree that this is an amazing tool for 21st century marketing, blogs can serve as a much bigger tool if used internally ...

Blogs can be used to facilitate knowledge flows within the organization. Agreed, a lot of organizations today find no practical use for changing knowledge flows (the typical reaction being that knowledge flows the way they exist today are ok), but we find that once we make knowledge freely available, people in the organization will work out innovative new ways of using the knowledge. I am not trying to make an argument for completely throwing all the windows open (thats never going to happen), but this would get the dialogue going within the organization, and who knows what might come out of this.

Another nice thing about blogs ... They can be used to replace the grapevine! We would all agree that the grapevine is not a very nice thing ... While you will find more often than not the grapevine carries facts, but then, it serves to distort the facts, too. Blogs, and their related communities can be used as an interventionist tool to counter these phenomenon.