With more companies discovering that blogs are a fantastic communication tool internally, they should keep in mind the tone, the message — the purpose.
Pith and Vinegar’s post, Making Communities Inside the Corporation, provides some insight that could be used as a springboard to building your internal blog. I’ve taken P&Vs outline in a bit of a different direction, so I encourage you to check out the original post (link above):
- Make it easy to understand for me to know if I want to be here or not (the site): Are your employees going to find value in visiting your internal blog, or is this just another corporate exercise to show you’re trying. Are you trying to build a community or is this another rote communique?
- Help me to find an answer to my question, or to find the information I’m looking for: An internal blog could drive traffic to the other intranet resources you have — and stop wondering why nobody uses those resources. Re-introduce and explain why they’re there in the first place.
- Thought leadership: Kick-start the culture you want in your company.
- Farming and sustaining processes: Introduce ideas across teams, knock down cubicles separating departments, put faces with names.
The two worst moves you can make with an Internal Blog:
- Launch it and let it go ghost. If you launch the blog and don’t use it, your silence will be a message to your employees (You don’t have time for them).
- JMCR or Just More Corporate Redundancy
Other solid reads on Internal Blogging:
- Cut Down on Email and More with an Internal Blog by Ken Yarmosh
- Blog for Real Employee Communication by Sterling Hager
Follow Mike Sansone on Twitter or Facebook or on Google+
Find Your Social Media ROI
I hear it from a lot of business owners: “Where is the ROI with all this Social Media?“ If this is a question you ask yourself, maybe we should work together a bit more. We can work together solo, or via a professional learning community. Find and increase your ROI. There is a “there” there.
