Community Built In
Another key difference for Intranet blogs vs. Internet blogs is the fact that Intranet blogs start with at least a couple of communities ready for them. A community is the group of people that follow the blog regularly and therefore care to make great comments, offer help for some of the content and in generally tend to help build the blog, as great blogs tend to have strong comment streams that add to the topics posted. Internet blogs, on the contrary, are usually born with either a small community or no community at all and grow one over time.
Intranet blogs, already start with at least two basic communities. The first community is that of all the members of the organization and the second one is composed by the people who work with the person who is starting the blog. In my personal case, my blog started to communicate people in my organization (Latin America Sales and Marketing) and also offered a regional point of view to anybody at Intel. Over time, my Intranet blog has evolved to have several communities in it, from the people in the Latin America team and people outside of it interested in Latin America, to people who share as similar point of view to me. Starting with a couple of communities ready for your blogs makes a lot of a difference. You are actually being red from post one, even if your audience is small.
A case that deserves special attention is the case of executive bloggers. High profile executives and managers of large groups tend to have a strong interest from the people working in their groups. The case of CEO bloggers has been widely discussed, but the same logic applies to Executive Vice Presidentes, General Managers and even middle manegers of large groups. People in the group tend to follow them, since their decisions are relevant to many people’s activities. Executive bloggers are a very important piece of any Intranet Blogosphere, they should be the role models of what good blogging is all about. An executive who makes a great use of a blog is both using a really strong communications tool to reach the organization as well as helping setting the tone of the whole Intrenal Blogosphere of his or her organization.
Comments
this is actually a really good point....MARKETING of internal blogs is vastly different than external.
internally, you'll find that a very few number of people put their blog in a sig file or something like that. marketing is almost not done because you know people are going to find it just by the nature of HAVING the environment.
externally, there are so many millions of blogs, you have to make yourself stand out somehow - you have to advertise, cross post, comment (like this), post your URL in various blog search engines, etc.
you don't have to do any of that internally. your internal search engines will usually do all the work for you (if set up correctly), and most of it spreads virally, by word of mouth. and because the number of bloggers is much smaller, you have a much higher visibility right out of the gate.
Posted by: Heath | November 16, 2006 06:44 PM