Corporate Internal Blogs

There has certainly been a lot of talk about corporate Blogging with more and more conferences and blog gatherings focused on blogging as a corporate medium. I know that one of my RSS folder views includes the corporate employee blogs of my customers, so i see the power both ways (buying and selling). We also have a very aggressive strategy to bring in blog content into our platform and tools, so i certainly have been doing much thinking and reading about the subject.

There is interesting piece this week over at BusinessWeekonline about how companies are using Corporate Internal Blogs. Interactive and cheap to deploy some companies are looking at Blogging tools to enable business units to 'own' the content push and encourage conversations. Not convinced that it will replace portals and intranets, but likely to become a communication tools outside of the e-mail inbox shortly.

We just launch an internal blog for the launch of our New Search 2.0 tool and although i haven't seen much of a 'conversation' yet, i am sure people like me are at least looking at the posts as they are relevant to the product launch. It doesn't seem much different then the regular postings on our portal, but for some reason it makes sense to me.

Enabling 'conversations' around news content has been something that i have been talking to clients for a while, but being that it was a new medium, i have had little success with implementing really cool what i call 'Daily News Conversations'. Below is a mock screen (click on it for bigger view) of what it could look like as an 'Executive Blog' allowing execs to carry on conversations within online and subscription options (e.g. RSS delivery) around news content potentially influencing how as a team they use external news to guide the organization. It is done today with copy and paste and forwarding between teams and then posting on corporate portals, blogging tools might facilitate this and allow execs, managers and employees themselves an interaction point. As established blogging software goes behind the firewall, it will enabled these types of conversations even more so.