Are you ready to blog it?

I was in the states recently and came across a few articles on blogs as corporate communications tools. An interesting concept, I thought. But how would this actually work?

Most people know blogs are a way to comment on certain topics in a collaborative, web-based environment. Similar to bulletin boards but more like running commentary, blogs provide a forum for opinions and allow users to view the discussion in a hierarchy of some kind for reference later. They were used strategically in the US presidential campaign last year to try to obtain the opinions of voters on certain issues. They are also used on a whole host of consumer-oriented sites to encourage traffic and achieve that all important ‘ear to the ground’ of consumer opinion.

In a corporate context, blogs could be used effectively by product development departments, marketing departments or even call centres, just to name a few. Imagine being able to record a daily/weekly log of your thinking throughout a project or an issue – free form, in your own words, a bit like a corporate diary – and then making this diary collaborative, allowing others to record their thoughts as well. These blogs could then be linked by topic to intranet pages covering the same issues.

Blogs could also be used to supplement project-management processes, creating an internal blog for use by private audiences (the employee, the agency, the contractor and the internal team). The project could then be preserved for future reference, helping avoid reinventing the wheel on future projects.

Of course, blogging within a corporate context is still in its infancy. But the early signs are encouraging. As discussed in the March issue of Enterprise Information, the corporate pioneers of blogs inevitably include a number of high-tech organisations, such as IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems, whose customers and employees are highly IT literate, familiar with the concept of the blog and comfortable working in that medium. But other organisations reportedly using blogs internally include the Disney Corporation, the US Navy, telecommunications provider Verizon and investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

As always, any comments on this topic are gratefully received. Please drop me a note at lynda@foursquaremedia.net.