Intranet Blogging

For our internal implementation, we also had the Employee Communications group from HR involved.

The legal team was quite large - it included legal representation for Privacy, HR, PR, and global perspectives.

And in your list, don’t forget the technology folks! They’re not the focus, but they cannot be left out. One issue that has repeatedly bothered most internal bloggers in our deployment has been the lack of continued support from the technical folks. In order to grow a community, the interface needs to evolve with the community needs. This is really important and has been greatly missed from our internal deployment.

O and two more groups missing from your list - seasoned bloggers and senior management… you want them interested as they will help set precendence for the type of environment that is deployed. The upper managers will draw in attention - then slowly, the good bloggers might steal that attention away!

interesting - my reader said there were no comments, then annie’s suddenly appeared….

i was also going to add technology, as there are many technology considerations on the type of environment you want - more like a blog? more like a forum? level of “moderation”? capabilities for images or code? etc….

HR, Legal, Corporate Diversity, all of those are necessary. Not sure about PR since it’s an intranet…that seems more appropriate for an external blog (but I don’t know how much PR is even involved there)

and i agree with some of annie’s points too - you really need a blogging champion in senior management - which I don’t think we have. we have senior managers who blog, but it’s so sporadic (in most cases), even the CEO took almost 6 months off, and he’s supposed to a be a role model for the environment…it’s now been “taken over” my employees (which isn’t a bad thing) - but it feels lop-sided.

Anne said pretty much what I was going to - we’ve included the programming group in writing editorial blogging guidelines, since they were initially the ones doing the most blogging. Experience is important.

And same for what she said about dev (I’d include product) - there may be features that make more sense for an internal environment, or should be disabled (third party tagging and pinging directories with updates are the first ones that come to mind).

This is a great discussion.

Anne - I agree with the fact that senior management needs to be on the bandwagon for this to have legs. Senior management bloggers become both a role model as well as help steer blogging towards blogging that is aligned with employee goals. This is a great insight.

Anne, Stephanie: On the technical community, that is also a great insight, on many cases blogging is comming out of the programming teams that see blogging as a great tool to share fixes and provide forums to discuss particular applications. They can be both role model bloggers as well as establish a dialogue with the blogger community for the continued development of the blogosphere.

Now, the next question to you both is - what kind of issues need to be addressed to cover the Legal aspects and build blogging guidelines? I have some ideas but would like to hear from you. We can kickstart that here and then move it to another post when we have enough meat.

Annie,

Since you went through the whole approvals process, I have a question for you. Of all the aspects to address before setting up an internal blogosphere, are there any that are more relevant, have to be addessed before other issues or have to be addressed on a special way? Can the approach to build a successful Intranet blogosphere be structured? If so, How?