Internal and External Corporate Blogs

Fredrik Wackå categorizes enterprise weblogs:

The reason I draw your attention to this is the important distinction between internal and external. Many articles and posts fail to make this distinction, leading to confusion over what is a corporate weblog. Instead of the next six types Fredrik offers, I'd suggest the simple categorization of if the blog has a single or multiple authors. Inside the enterprise group blogs are more common and oriented towards collaboration. The topic or objective of a blog can change over time, as most things do, and most individual blogs defy categorization.

Comments

[Marc g]

Why would a knowledge blog be internal? If you look at our corporate blogs at http://sdn.sap.com (free registration for now, open soon) I think you'll see that they are almost entirely knowledge focused. I think most from Microsoft and Sun are as well as most other technology companies. We don't even have any internal blogs, though we do use Wikis rather extensively.

[Euan]

Glad you brought up this distinction Ross. It has been bugging me that when people talk about corporate blogging they are talking about external facing blogs.

[Jay Fienberg]

There definitely has been a need to clarify between internal/external when discussing "corporate blogs".

In my recent experience with internal corporate blogs, categorization of blog "types" has been useful for addressing blog designs and the internal promotion of blogs. The "human" quality of blogs is often served by developing the expression of emotional nuance through visual design--and this carries over into how these sites are made known.

So, we've used categories like "educational", "informational", "trusted source", and "people focused", for example.

[Euan]

That is very interesting Jay. I think for a lot of people the personal nature of blogs is the antithesis of what they expect - and what is expected - "at work".

[Adina Levin]

Euan, in our experience, intranet business bloggers write largely about the research and project updates of their daily work, interspersed with an occasional personal post.

The personal nature of weblog entries at work plays a similar role to pre/post-meeting chitchat about sports or cooking or gizmos. At Socialtext, we're partial to occasional silly pictures. It's social connection, and it doesn't crowd out the business purpose.

Have you seen counter-examples? I've heard this concern much more extensively in theory -- worry about sparking the next washingtonienne -- and much less in practice.

Because intranet business blogs are so obviously visible and connected to the blogger's professional identity, they're not any more subject to abuse than meetings (where participants can riff off-topic, at the cost of social and professional disapproval).

More thoughts following up this post, here:
http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/001465.html#001465

[Euan]

I'd agree with you Adina - most blogs are about day to day project work with the odd bit of personal view thrown in. For some though they have to overcome reticence about expressing their views in writing and in public.