Blogs as a management tool: what’s important is content

loupeIf you’ve read my post about blogs as a management tool, your reaction may (and should) have been “this will generate so much content that it will quickly besome unable”. This clear-headed reaction is half right, half wrong, depending on how the platform is conceived.

Internal blogs have to aims: facilitating communication and managing content. The second aim (and partly the first) is highly depending not on the generated information but on how anybody can find what he’s looking for.

For example, anyone who wants to know what was written on one subject will use search tools based on word or tags search. That’s the first level.

But managers may want to have a specific access to information… and that’s what gives a real added value to the internal blog platform [Read more...]

Using internal blogs as a management tool

collaborationInternal blogs are not a new thing. But, most often, they’re the consequence of isolated initiatives, someone who once says “a blog would be a good thing to manage this project”. Since they’re not a part of a strategic vision and they don’t bring as added value as they could.

Let’s see how internal blogs can improve management.

Consider, as a basic premise, that every employee in your company has a blog. An internal blog, that’s important because what’s said on blog is a private and confidential as what you can put on an intranet. Another significant thing is that it’s not a collective blog or a project manager’s blog where you can comment either…it’s an internal blogging platform…you’ll understand later why this point is so important to me. In this situation, and due to a professionnal context, we’d rather say notepad instead of blog…
So let your employees blog (or write on their notepad), about their job, their win, their best practices, their ideas…and think about what it can bring to the company. [Read more...]