Blogs in Organizations

Blogs such as this one are used for many reasons such as:

1) voicing opinions
2)updating people on new events
3)giving expert advice to those who need it

Blogs, however, can be used for the very same uses within an organization.

For example, When I worked at Google inc. in the summer of 2007 their marketing department chief of North America had a blog that he updated DAILY. Why you might ask? Because the advertising market is ever changing, and in order to keep people updated on any major change in stategy he would post it on his blog (which everyone it was relevant to checked daily). This avoided him needed to send out tons of e-mails and put the onus on the employees to be up to date. Another example of this is the IT department giving updates on how to use certain new applications and get the most out of the tools you have, again, this reduces the work load on IT people because a lot of question they are normally asked multiple times are out there in the open and help prevent them from repeating themselves.

There are some drawbacks to blogs in an organization. You have to rely on employees to check the blog, if they dont they may be wasting time trying to figure things out on their own, this risk would normally be eliminated by MANDATORY training seminars . Blogs have the potential to spread tons of useful information accross organizations, especially tacit knowledge, which can be more easily passed from one division of the organization to another more easily with the use of blogs. All in all having each department setting up a blog could help make each employee more aware of how their actions are affecting the organization as a whole.