The Corporate Blog – Tackling Topics of the Day

This is my second in a series on a company I have unique access to, I’m calling Company S. While its a global company and has a very “corporate” culture its very progressive in its acceptance of technology. They have added a blog component to their very comprehensive Intranet and are experiencing growing pains in getting acceptance and usage from their employees. But that’s what I covered in the first blog entry about Company S.

Let’s discuss some of the topics that are being tackled on their various blogs. In the last entry, I covered that they were experiencing some usage issues by the employees of their managment blog which is presented by the entire management team. After asking some questions of why a lot of employees are reading the blog, yet only a handful are actually leaving comments, the feedback was quick and powerful. They received the most comments back on this entry and the consensus was, discuss topics that affect the employees in their everyday jobs, rather than academic or generic topics pointed to not offend or stir up controversy. These were the majority of the comments. But it was interesting that the questioning-the-value-of-the-blog entry received the most comments in this blog — ever.

The follow-up entry asked more specifically about what topics employees want to hear and what obstacles are in place that hammer the employees from doing their jobs. The feedback has been honest and hopefully helpful for the management to hear. Everything from broken equipment to revising the travel planning system that the sales team uses have been brought up.

Time will tell, and time will also judge the next steps for the blog in the corporate world. But it seems Company S is getting to what truly blogs can do for your company, opening up the communication lines, getting beyond hierarchy and politically correct topics – back to honest and free flowing communication.

The next in the series will cover some of the lighter topics being discussed on Company S’s blogs.

I’m really intersted in hearing what your thoughts are on management blogs. Can they have multiple authors? What topics are most effective for corporate blogs? How is your company using blogs, or what’s preventing them?

Until next time, Tim

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1. Obsolete Skills and the Skills Needed for Today’s Blog Communication
2. Corporate Blogging Experiencing Growing Pains
3. Updating my Blog – New Look and Feel
4. Corporate America Embracing Twitter
5. Social Media Trends – Part 2 of 4