I am still working on the Corporate Blogging brief I have to present to the head of our organizational unit. I had a look at a few resources mentioned on Constantin's extensive NewPRWiki, but the vast majority of them deal with external corporate blogs, which we are not yet ready to tackle. The most relevant resource I could find is the audio from Euan Semple's presentation at LesBlogs, and it's a bit ironic that I had to listen to it at home even though I was there, and had Euan seated on my right at the speakers' dinner. Guess I was too busy meeting people and worrying about my panel to be really interested in Euan's experience, since I only asked him a question about corporate politics in their blogs which he did not like too much and to which he gave me a half-answer.
Unfortunately I do not think we can follow the same bottom-up approach that has worked for the BBC, as we are a larger, more hyerarchical, less creative, and much much more conservative institution. People here tend to stick to an established routine and to use well known tools and practices, even outside the office when surfing the web at home (if they do it at all). So to be of any interest and attract a sufficient number of users, our internal blogs must either offer a valuable service, or serve as a direct communication channel with the upper management so that people will use it as yet another tool in their corporate politics arsenal.
It may be ugly, but I do not see other ways of introducing blogging here. If I can get the top management to adopt internal group blogs (what Fredrik Wackå calls Knowledge Blogs) as a way of efficiently communicating with their units, and people to read and comment on those blogs so as not to miss an opportunity to show off in front of their bosses and to have they voice heard, I'm pretty sure we will later be able to adopt other forms of internal blogs like "project blogs". And maybe start using news readers, and aggregating on the blogs data coming from various enterprise repositories.
Am I totally off the mark? Is there anything I'm missing?
To be honest - though we started bottom up we have had a huge boost for internal blogging when one of our execs started blogging inside the firewall. He has taken like to it like a duck to water and really got into the spirit of blogging - writing frequent, personal and “linky” posts.
I would still maintain, however, that trying to convince people who don’t get it and will be probably be bad at it to blog just because of their position in the organisation is madness!
Euan, great to know at least one of my theories is right. :) I agree that trying to turn unwilling people into bloggers is not a sound idea, but the particular exec I have in mind knows about blogs, and seems to have a deep love and a good understanding of technologies. And I’m hoping that among our 50k employees there will be a few who can become decent bloggers. Time will tell, thanks for the peek behind the firewall.
Would SocialText (the thing Loic used to get us all to register for LesBlogs) be something which you could introduce into the company? Wiki with blogging incorporated. Definitely a corporate tool. But, being standards-based, you can squirt unsexy posts out to sexy blogging systems.
Yes, I know SocialText and it would be a good start as wikis are easier to introduce than blogs, and ST has lots of nice features. But its pricing is a bit steep (40USD a month per user is more than what we pay for OS licenses, etc.), and I’m sure if I ever convince the upper management to try social software it will be without any budget, at least until people actually start getting practical benefits.
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