Not all blogs are open to the general public. There are also internal blogs, i.e. corporate blogs aimed at the employees of an organization/company. Many corporations and other organizations now use social networking platforms as their corporate intranet. Blogs can be an integral part of the intranet.There are tons of tips out there how to start a blog, how to blog, etc., but not nearly as much about internal blogs. So, why should you company consider setting up an internal blog?
Internal blogging as projects’ support system
Blogs are personal. Blogs aren’t official (bureaucratic) documents. Blog posts are first-person, exploratory narratives. As such they are more attractive to the readers, who are thus more open to actually read them. This leads to content variety within your organization; content that is relevant to your employees. Internal blogs can therefore achieve much better awareness of your corporate culture, of your projects, future plans, etc. Think about it: you can pursue a great project, but if it’s not explained adequately, it won’t be adequately supported which can severely undermine its success. Internal blogging, on the other hand, can help ensure great projects receive great explanation.
Community building
For blog to succeed it must supply the needs of its community. Their needs can be met by regularly posting relevant and engaging content, says Boštjan. An internal blog can be a powerful (corporate) community building channel, especially in big companies. Technical or business insight posted to an internal blog can move around the company quickly. Any analysis and wisdom has potential to gain wide attention via internal blog. A blog post can easily turn into an active discussion around a topic. This helps you gauge where your coworkers stand on certain issues.
Visibility is capital
Moreover, internal blogs can increase your individual or your team’s visibility. And you know what they say? Visibility is capital. If your company sets up an internal blog, make sure there is a wide support for it, that different departments and teams understand well its objectives and advantages to avoid a usual impression that only those who aren’t busy enough at their jobs, blog. This is so wrong and unfortunately too many times keeps employees from blogging.
(Internal) blog is a blog
For your internal blog to be successful, you shouldn’t approach it as an “internal” blog, rather as any other blog we’ve been writing about on Z-Blog, save the target audience happen to be exclusively the employees in your company/organization. When setting up such a blog, you should consider all questions you’d consider as a “regular” blogger:
- What are the blog’s objectives?
- What are you going to write about?
- Who will be primarily responsible (editing, proofreading, looking for authors, content ideas for posts) for the blog?
- Who will serve as primary writer?
- How often will you update it? Etc.
Done properly, an internal blog is good, not only for the organization, but for the bloggers as well. For example, businesses blog to show their thought leadership. They blog because blogging is ideal for publishing content that is relevant/useful to readers. The same applies to internal blogging, save the readers are exclusively the employees.
What is your take on internal blogging? Would it be a great fit for your organization? Let us know in the comments below.
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