I’m fortunate enough to be doing some Intranet work for a large global corporation that embraces technology. There Intranet is far reaching and vastly out shines what I’ve seen from other “progressive” corporations. My work is just refined to an initiative for a division in the US, but their Intranet spans the globe and is very current. But I’m not writing about the entire Intranet here, rather one of the tools that – let’s call them “Company S” – is experimenting with and feeling some growing pains and adoption issues with - the corporate blog. Unfortunately, they are internal blogs and can’t be shared here, but we can examine their challenges and learn from them.

It’s interesting Company S has taken the blog and run with it, there must be 25-30 different blogs covering such topics as diversity, design, social media, technical or engineering to great ones on odd jobs at Company S, Second Life and management. It’s the management one in particular that is experiencing the growing pain and participation issues. Seems the blog started in the fall of 2007 and has had 15 weekly topics presented from different members of the management team. That fact alone makes me wonder, because this blog doesn’t have a single voice, does that effect employees getting involved? As for participation their are roughly 3,000 employees that have access and supposedly be interested in what management is saying, yet over the 15 weeks their have only been a total of 95 comments.

Armed with these stats, the party responsible for the blog, management but also the corporate communications team is asking for feedback through the blog. Asking about its value, the topics presented, and how to get more employees involved. So far the most comments of any topics have arrived at the blog – with an overwhelming majority finding value in the blog. Seems the employees want to make some changes to this blog to build its value. It’s the present topics that people are finding fault with. They feel that are to academic, generic or sterile. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the employees are seeing through the facade and getting a sense that nothing daring or transparent is being shared within the blog. That management might not be truly writing this blog. A blog needs to be written by its author, not a department assigned to present sales figures and company position in a sterile and formulaic fashion. It’s not the cc department’s fault, and it’s not confined to just Company S, every company wanting to take advantage of this communication tools need to be daring and get beyond the old school mentality that they control the message, but also need to convince management to author their own messages and start sharing. Once they do that, and take the celebrity bloggers and political bloggers lead they will find similar participation. As BusinessWeek pronounced if you aren’t using social media to reach and motivate employees and customers – your competition will.

Let me know your thoughts on this topic – can corporations use the blog to its fullest, or are old school mentalities dooming it?

I’m going to discuss the other blogs at Company S and some of the great discussions they create in future entries. Please let me know your thoughts, until next time, Tim