While the concept is encouraging, I think that some companies (including the one I work for) don’t really ‘get’ blogging. There has been some talk, and the only place I’ve heard it from is the corporate officer level. This worries me because I don’t believe that the right people are thinking about blogging, or that they are thinking about it for the right reason.
What may be a powerful means of communicating with customers, or even simply within the company, is getting lost in a typical discussion of what tool to use. The fact that SharePoint was looked at along with wiki software tells me that the people looking for the blogging solution at our company, don’t even know why they should blog. SharePoint is a powerful tool and one can add a blogging component to it, but at its heart SharePoint is a collaboration tool.
It’s similar to what we did several years ago with SourceSafe. We had (actually still have) a need for a document management system. Somehow, someone got the ‘great’ idea to use SourceSafe. SourceSafe itself is a good product… for source code management. How the fact that it was a source code management system and not a document management tool got lost on everyone with decision-making power. What did we use SourceSafe for? Managing Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents, CD ISO images (please stop laughing, yes really), and many other items that should never be stored in a flat-file database (and these were ‘IT’ people who decided this!) Now I’ll be the first to rave about the wonders of SharePoint, and for a number of reasons, but blogging will not be among them – at all. Luckily it didn’t make it too far in the evaluation, and I’m not sure what software has made it any farther as the criteria for a corporate blogging solution is being tightly held.
What use is even considering a corporate blogging solution when the people evaluating the concepts don’t even understand what a blog is for? This is what concerns me about corporate blogging – that it gets tied up with the wrong people. And that the whole idea of blogging is for the wrong reason. I’ve got a suspicion that most companies that either have or are considering corporate blogging have the wrong idea about it, and have the wrong people investigating it.
Technorati tags: Corporate Blogging