Telephone Excellence by Mike Mitchell

Blogging for Business: Part I
By Mike Mitchell

Recently, I attended the two day ITEC Conference and Exhibition in Atlanta where over 75 vendors displayed their products and services. As a former technical instructor, I was drawn to the educational sessions. There were 30 sessions including 4 keynote presentations / panel discussions. One especially intriguing keynote presentation was a collaboration between Steffen Berelowitz, President and founder of BitGroup in Cambridge, MA., and Timothy O’Conner, Systems Consultant with CrossIntegration in Canton, MA.

The High-Tech Playground
As I watched their Power Point presentation, The High Tech Playground: Why Blogs, RSS, and Wikis Are Serious Tools You Need Now, I wondered how many organizations are incorporating Web 2.0 technologies (a term coined by Dale Daugherty, a VP at O’Reilly Media) such blogs, social networking, wikis, and RSS feeds into everyday business life.

Their excellent presentation featured an overview of these technologies and mainly focused on the B2C environment. However, I was struck by a portion of Timothy’s presentation about the benefits of utilizing blogs within an organization.

Benefits of Internal Blogging
Internal blogs can disseminate information more effectively to employees who actually need know the specifics of an event, project, marketing campaign, network status, etc. Major corporations are already using this technology to help employees stay connected and to collect feedback. For example, Daimler Chrysler uses web log software at a few of its U.S. plants so managers can discuss problems and keep a record of their solutions. IBM uses blogs to let employees in more than 30 countries discuss software development projects and business strategies.

Debbie Weil, in her book The Corporate Blogging Book, quotes communications expert Shel Holtz who listed several benefits of implementing internal corporate blogs. I’ve added a few examples of the advantages for a department or organization.

• Alerts: Instead of sending out blanket emails, let employees subscribe to work-relevant blogs covering server status, network status, volunteer opportunities, etc.

• Projects: Reduce those all hands emails with a total project status blog as well as an individual team status blog for only the staff who need to know.

• Departments: Great for updating the company telephone directory, announcing new products or enhanced department services.

• News: Employees can contribute content for community activities or campus events, a function that may be especially useful for an organization with several campuses where there is little interaction among staff.

• Customer Information: Share useful information about a customer’s problem and resolution of the problem.

• CEO Blog: Eliminate top down bulk emails. Here CEOs can post new corporate values, planning changes, or simply to make a company announcement (my CEO once sent an email to all employees telling us to stop sending so many emails!).

What’s Next?
Next month I’ll give you some advantages of external company blogs, not the least of which is giving your organization a more current, high tech ‘image makeover’. We’ll also look at the disadvantages of not having an external corporate blog.

I’d like to know your company’s experiences with blogging. Have you implemented one or more blogs? What results have you achieved? Drop me an email at mike@telexcellence.com.

-Mike-