Who can be against internal blogging (experiments) now?
Via the new MyRagan community I found this excellent discussion on the value of internal blogging.
Challenged by a rather negative article of the famous communicator Roger D’Aprix, which, via arguments about information overload and reduced employee productivity concluded that:
But who can tell which ones [blogs] are valuable and which ones are a waste of time without inspecting them? So the productivity losses still add up. The pro-bloggers will hate it, but maybe we need some good gate keeping to filter out the inevitable junk.
Shel Holtz provided an extensive list of counter arguments explaining the potential value of internal blogging and some additional links, which are really worth checking out and use for your own benefit (I will not copy them, as the fully belong to Shel!).
Of course whether an internal weblogging experiment really succeeds might be hard to tell up-front. According to Andrew McAfee in his great article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration it really very much depends on management:
The tools reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and will be used to express some level of negativity. Do company’s leaders really want this to happen? Will they resist the temptation to silence dissent…[or]… to exert all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle leverage over online content?
This means that leaders need to play a delicate role…encouraging and stimulating the use of the new tools and refrain from intervening too often…[and] if they fail…their company is liable to wind up with only a few online newsletters and whiteboards for prosaic purposes [and not a thriving internal blogosphere with all it’s great benefits]
Quite a delicate balance if you ask me, but at least worth a try.
Shel, can I give you a virtual hug for your excellent contribution? I guess a lot of internal Enterprise 2.0 evangelists are going to benefit from this!
Technorati tags: Shel Holtz, Internal Blogging, Andrew McAfee, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Blog, Internal Communication
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posted Oct 3, 10:35 pm on Oct 03, 2007 |
category: Blogging
/ Enterprise 2.0