Internal Blogs

IBM encourages all 320,000+ employees worldwide to consider engaging actively in the practice of "blogging". At this time last year, IBM’s “blogosphere” featured 3,097 individual blogs, 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries with a total of 26,203 entries and comments -- all of which has been put together strictly through word-of-mouth promotion. And this was just the pilot.

Unlike email, intranets and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date. Unlike most corporate intranets, they're a bottoms-up approach to communication. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more," says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review. "Even better, you understand them faster."

According to Fortune, “the best part about blogging is that it's a conversation”

So do blogs hold the key to seamless sharing of collective corporate intelligence, the holy grail of knowledge management? “ A recent article in InfoWorld states, “Blogs...have moved past the flashy tech bling phase and are now settling in as core elements of the enterprise collaboration infrastructure. Blogs…are slowly making inroads at the enterprise level, as companies increasingly realize that the tight sense of community around them works well for collaboration as well as enhancing social bonds between employees.”

Many executives including the president of McDonald’s and Sun use blogs to keep employees informed, reinforce corporate values and solicit feedback from the workforce (look who's blogging).