How can a blog be useful internally in an organization? Question and answer from the GABA panel at SAP last night

It was quite an interesting panel last night which dealt with the topics of e-mail comunication and blogs, their benefits, as well as the risks and costs associated with their usage. One of the questions that I was aksed related to how can a blog be useful internally in an organization. Here are the examples I provided:

1. People who are subject matter experts can better share their knowledge through blogs, instead of answering questions by e-mail (and answering the same questions over and over again, and having this valuable knowledge scattered in mailboxes throughout the organization), the blog makes this knowledge reacheable and usable

2. People who are in touch with the external audiences (perfoming customer-facing activities such as sales, marketing, business development, and customer service) can share their experiences with the rest of the organizations via blogs.

3. Blog can also be used by the thought leaders and management to impact the culture. If we want a customer service oriented culture, we need to evangelize it, and blogs can be an important part of this effort.

A lot more can be said about this topic, so feel free to add your comments.

Comments

[Sean Murphy]

I enjoyed meeting you and was impressed by your remarks. Your point #1 can certainly apply to product marketing and competitive intelligence folks (blogging inside the firewall) communicating with a sales force. I think e-mail in large companies suffers as much from "organizational spam" as regular spam, and the sales force can feel bombarded by messages they have no use for. But a blog keeps the most topical issues near the top.

I have also seen it work in manufacturing organizations that are globally distributed, it's an easy method to post notes and other information that's topical but quickly ages out.