Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Division of Information Studies

H6612 Information Management

Assignment 1b: Blogs - Advantages of Blogging in Business

Submitted by:
Chee Han Boon Thomas (G0801613G)

Guided by:
Dr. Mian Shaheen Majid

Date Submitted:
11 March 2009
 Table of Contents

Table of Contents............................................................................................................................ 1

Abstract........................................................................................................................................... 2

1. Introduction to Corporate Blogging........................................................................................2

2. Type of Corporate Blogs: Internal & External Blogs and their Uses......................................2

3. Advantages and Challenges of Blogging in Business...........................................................3

4. Blogs to aid in Problem-Solving and Information Management.............................................5

5. Conclusions.......................................................................................................................... 5

Appendix: Links to Sample Blogging Policies and Guidelines..........................................................6

References...................................................................................................................................... 7

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 Abstract
With the rise in popularity of social media, leading organizations are embracing Web 2.0 technologies to
improve collaboration and communication and to tap on the collective intelligence of groups to create a web
of knowledge to aid in problem-solving and decisions making. This paper focuses its discussion on the use
and advantages of corporate blogs for collaboration and information sharing within an organization. It also
highlights some of the challenges and issues of blogging such as loss of control, legal issues, sustainability,
etc and how appropriate blogging policies and guidelines can help address some of these concerns and to
capitalize on the advantages of corporate blogging.

1. Introduction to Corporate Blogging

Blog is one the Web 2.0 collaboration tools which evolved from the term “Web Log” and it is
basically a website which allow individuals to easily create and publish online journals,
commentaries and events and may include audio, graphics and video. “Corporate blogging is the
use of blogs to further organization goals” (Weil, 2006, p.1). It is a two-way communications and
marketing channels that connect the organization to the blogosphere community where
information, links, opinions, videos, audio files, photos and other forms of media are easily and
frequently shared, where elaboration can be offered, disagreements can be aired and comments
can be posted (Weil, 2006). A blog is a sort of personal broadcasting system, is like a presentation
and a form of one-to-many form of communication. Unlike blogs, wikis are a many-to-many
collaborative tool designed for continual editing by aggregating inputs from multiple people (Delio,
2005).

2. Type of Corporate Blogs: Internal & External Blogs and their Uses
According to Weil (2006), corporate blogs can be divided into two main categories; (1) external or
public blogs which are accessible to anyone with a Web browser through a public URL and (2)
internal or “dark” blogs which are built behind a firewall within the company’s intranet and are
meant for internal consumption. Internal blogs are increasingly use for real-time and systematic
collaboration on project management and information sharing and it enables the company to
capitalize on the enormous amount of knowledge possessed by its employees.

Some of the possible uses of internal blogs from Weil (2006) include,
1. Alert Notifications- Employees who need to know about server downtime can subscribe
through web feeds to the company’s server status blog, thus reducing the amount of
notification emails to be sent out by the IT department.
2. Project Management - Project leaders can maintain a blog to update on the current status of
the project or to maintain ongoing records of decision and actions taken to capture institutional
memories. Internal “blog forums” enable different departments to exchange information more
efficiently, support cross communication between projects and quicken top-down project
review. When the project is done, this project management blog can become a searchable
knowledge management repository (Cone, 2005).

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3. Departmental - Departments can maintain blogs to let everyone in the company know of their
current offerings or achievements.
4. Brainstorming - Employees can make use of blogs to brainstorm about strategy, process and
other relevant topics.
5. Customer Relations - Employees can share substance of customer visits or phone calls.
6. News - Employees can contribute industry or company news to a group blog for internal
information sharing and collaboration.
7. Personal Blogs - Employees may capture their expertise, post a summary of the articles he
read or notes he took at meetings and share with everyone in the company. It is a personal
knowledge management to help employees working with large amounts of information that
they need to track, store or report on (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006). It made it easier to disseminate
information to the rest of the team and eliminate the need to write monthly progress reports.
8. CEO Blog - A great way for the CEO to share his “thought leadership” and get closer to his
employees.

On the other hand, external blogs can be use as,

1. An informal way to publish the company news and other useful information that don’t make it
into the company’s e-newsletter or print publications.
2. A place to solicit feedback from customers with the goal to build customers’ confidence in the
company’s product and services by sharing relevant information in a transparent, open and
honest way so as to enhance customer relationships and community building.
3. A viral marketing and PR communications tools which tapped on its instant publishing
advantage that bypass mainstream media and allow it to function as complementary to press
releases or for issues management.
4. A channel to build up expertise and “thought leadership” of the company where an
acknowledged expert (e.g. CEO, senior executive, well-known person) blogs on a narrowly
focused topic of the industry niche, insights, etc.
5. The company new-generation corporate website with advantages such as improved search
engine rankings, a lightweight content management system that enables employees to
instantly share information or archive contents on the site and the ability to more effectively
transmit and share company’s information and knowledge with her customers, business
partners or community, etc.

3. Advantages and Challenges of Blogging in Business

According to Weil (2006), the explosion of blogs is due to three factors; its scale, speed and
impact. What started as personal blogs written by individuals who captured them as diaries, have
exponentially scaled to include consultants, academics, small enterprises owners and increasingly
by bigger companies and corporations now. In Cone (2005) article, it mentioned that “people flock

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to things that are easy to use and deliver quick results and blogs are easy enough that people take
it up on their own to put things on the web”. Table 1 below summarized some of the advantages
and challenges of blogging which were gathered from various online and textual sources.
Advantages of Blogging
1. Blogs are instant and being “always-on”,
people are turning to blogs to get the most
up-to-date news and in turn, to post their
version of events. The content is fresher as
it comes from a distributed authorship of
people from different departments (Cone,
2005).
2. A blog is different from a conventional static
website because it is more engaging and
interactive, written in conversational style
created using easy to use, instant
publishing software. The strength of blogs is
that they provide direct interaction with
readers as many prefer to deal with voice of
“real” people instead of interacting through
traditional media such as press releases
(Delio, 2005).
3. The blog software may also eliminate the
need for the company to invest in expensive
new content management system (Cone,
2005).
4. As the blog content is frequently updated, it
often gets higher rankings in search engine
results than a static website.
5. It is also a form of viral marketing which
offers an efficient way to alert interested
readers every time something new is added
through subscription to web feeds such as
RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
6. Blogs can be engaged as an interactive,
low-cost, high impact add-on to the
company’s communication strategy to
establish a real-time, efficient channel with
its customers, suppliers, partners, investors,
media and other key constituencies.
7. Advanced in collaborative technology such
as blogs allow users to exchange ideas and
information instantly. People no longer need
to be in the same room, city or country to
collaborate (Thompson, 2008).
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Challenges or Issues of Blogging
1. The 3 Cs of blogging: be Conversational, Cogent and
Compelling. Good blogging is good writing and good
writing is hard (Weil, 2006). Blogging requires quality
time from quality people with quality ideas.
2. There are legal issues associated with blogging
ranging from intellectual property infringement,
freedom of speech, employee rights, trade secrets,
improper financial disclosures, etc. According to
Cone (2006), Google fired a worker for disclosing too
much about everyday life within the company at his
blog. To address this, some companies put up
corporate blogging policies & guidelines or code of
ethics to educate employees on personal
responsibility when they participate in online
publishing.
3. A successful corporate blog needs to be consistently
published to keep the content fresh and going. Time
to blog and energy to maintain them are the top fear
factors of blogging (Weil, 2006).
4. To ensure sustainability and continual effort to
motivate and engage people to contribute collectively
in these activities, whether incentives such as cash
rewards, prizes, recognition, etc can effective
simulate continual participation (Bonabeau, 2009).
5. Some considered blogging as a distraction to
employees, wasting huge amount of time reading or
writing them. Weil (2006) included a survey that
found that 1 in 4 workers spend about 4 hours or 9
percent of their work week reading blogs in 2005.
Probably these figures may be much higher now.
What is the bottom line for corporate blogging?
6. Oon and Au Yong (2009) in their article discussed the
idea of community moderation to set standards to
help draws lines of what is good and bad online
discourse. 3 possible community moderation models
were considered, a panel, a code of conduct or an
ombudsman. However, the online resistance to being
controlled in a medium where freedom is everything
makes this idea very difficult to implement.
7. Weil (2006) talked about the fear of losing control - it
was articulated that the underbelly of blogosphere is
a place where rumors, malicious and half-baked
stories can be spread around the world in hours or
days. Lazar (2007) mentioned that companies have
concerns on potentially negative impact of Web 2.0
applications on their business, including lack of
 organization, loss of data and bad publicity. Thus, to
protect the company, it is necessary to educate their
employees and to put in place blogging guidelines.

Table 1: Advantages and Challenges of Blogging

4. Blogs to aid in Problem-Solving and Information Management

The key characteristic of corporate blogging is to leverage on people in social networks to aid in
problem-solving and information management. According to Scarff (2006), the features of Web 2.0
collaborative tools such as blogs can help improve customer service, support competitive
intelligence for product and marketing development and give staff a better understanding of their
company’s competitive advantages. It facilitates the lurkers or shy people to contribute in a less
threatening way than in a face-to-face meeting and it reduces the domineering personalities from
taking over the conversation. Company can also engage their customers and business partners to
participate and contribute to knowledge sharing through blogs or forums. Lazar (2007) mentioned
that company without the grasp of Web 2.0 will never know what they are missing and will suffer
against competitors who are able to leverage Web 2.0 tools to improve business processes,
reducing costs and adding to the bottom line. Accordingly to Bonabeau (2009), many companies
have begun to tap into collective intelligence through the use of Web 2.0 to help them make better
decisions by outreach and aggregation of diversify viewpoints and inputs to deter human biases
such as self-serving bias, belief perseverance, pattern obsession and negative framing effects in
decision-making tasks. Bruns and Jacobs (2006) explained that blogs allow for personal narrative
and with discussion between blogger and readers, can turn data or information into knowledge.
And with simple categorization, search and linking facilities, blogs create a web of knowledge that
can be easily accessed by employees within the organization at their convenient to assist them in
problem-solving, make decisions and take actions.

5. Conclusions
The ability to connect, share and structure information so that the right information can be
captured and the new knowledge created are made available to the right person at the right time,
at the right place and in the right format are key attributes for the success of an intelligent
organization in a hypercompetitive and fast-paced world of business today (Haeckel & Nolan,
1993). Tapping on the popularity of social media, it is essential for organization to capitalize on
these Web 2.0 collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis, to open up the communication
connectivity among its people and advance information sharing to a new level. From this study, it
was found that with appropriate blogging policies and guidelines put in place, blogs is definitely
one key collaborative tool that offers real opportunities to improve collaboration and
communication in an organization to aid in problem-solving and information management.

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Appendix: Links to Sample Blogging Policies and Guidelines

1. http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp
2. http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
3. http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2004/11/blogging_policy.html
4. http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/ciscos_internet_postings_policy/
5. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/terms-of-use/

Sample Corporate Blogging policy

1. Make it clear that the views expressed in the blog are yours alone and do not necessarily
represent the views of your employer.
2. Respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information.
3. Ask your manager if you have any questions about what is appropriate to include in your blog.
4. Be respectful to the company, employees, customers, partners, and competitors.
5. Understand when the company asks that topics not be discussed for confidentiality or legal
compliance reasons.
6. Ensure that your blogging activity does not interfere with your work commitments.

Sample Blogger Code of Ethics

1. I will tell the truth.
2. I will write deliberately and with accuracy.
3. I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly.
4. I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes so as to
maintain the integrity of my publishing.
5. I will never delete a post.
6. I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic.
7. I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly.
8. I will strive for high quality with every post – including basic spellchecking.
9. I will stay on topic.
10. I will disagree with other opinions respectfully.
11. I will link to online references and original source materials directly.
12. I will disclose conflicts of interest.
13. I will keep private issues and topics private, since discussing private issues would jeopardize
my personal and work relationships. (Reference from the Forrester Best Practice report)

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References

Bonabeau, E. (2009). Decision 2.0: the Power of Collective Intelligence. MIT Sloan Management
Review, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p45-52.

Bruns, A., & Jacobs, J. (2006). Uses of blogs. New York: Peter Lang.

Choo, C. W. (2002). Information management for the intelligent organization: the art of scanning
the environment. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today.

Cone, E. (2005, April). Rise of the blog. CIO Insight, Issue 52, p54-62.

Delio, M. (2005, March). The Enterprise Blogosphere. InfoWorld, Vol. 27 Issue 13, p42-47.

Haeckel, S. H. & Nolan, R. L. (1993, September / October). Managing by Wire. Harvard Business
Review, Vol. 71 Issue 5, p122-133.

Lazar, I. (2007, August). Creating Enterprise 2.0 from Web 2.0. Business Communications
Review, Vol. 37 Issue 8, p14-16.

Onn, C., & Au Yong, J. (2009, February 21). Moderate so govt can de-regulate. The Straits Times.
Retrieved from http:/www.straitstimes.com/print/Insight/Story/STIStory_341005.html.

Scarff, A. (2006, September / October). Advancing knowledge sharing with intranet 2.0. KM
Review, Vol. 9 Issue 4, p24-27.

Thompson, M. W. (2008, February). Technology & SH&E Excellence. Professional Safety, Vol. 53
Issue 2, p7.

Weil, D. (2006). The corporate blogging book: Absolutely everything you need to know to get it
right. New York: Portfolio.

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