Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging

Writing diary

Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance.

In this post, I focus on the following.

  • Common reaction of business executives and professionals to blogs as personal diaries;
  • Social and task benefits of blogging; and
  • How to increase blogging at work.

Common reaction to blogs as personal diaries

I present blogs to my audience (of business executives and professionals) as a web diary. I make them do a small exercise in which I direct them to look at selected blogs to help them gain a better understanding of blogs. They see that in a work context, a blogger typically  shares her/his thoughts, activities s/he is engaged in, interesting things s/he has experienced or come across, goals for the day or week and how well they were achieved, specific work-related problems for which s/he is seeking solutions, and the like. My audience also sees that blog readers interact with the blogger via commenting.

After this exercise, I commonly hear “If my team and I do this, when will we do our work? This is going to be a complete waste of our time. My company will never allow this.” I then probe my audience and ask them about the state of communication within their organization. It is rare to find individuals who are happy with the level and nature of communication in their organizations. For instance, communication from the top may be rare and largely one-way. That from their peers and subordinates may be largely via email and focused almost entirely on the task at hand. Very rarely do I find someone from my audience telling me that the communication in their organization is open and personal.

Social and task benefits of blogging

What my audience typically misses after the initial exercise is that blogs facilitate an opening up of people and their communication. In their research (pdf) on corporate blogging at a large corporation, Anne Jackson, JoAnne Yates, and Wanda Orlikowski found that being able to communicate (freely, widely, informally, without bureaucracy, quickly, easily) was one of the most cited benefits of blogging. By facilitating open and personal communication, blogs can have both social and task benefits. As I argue below, spending time on blogging may actually turn out to be time well spent.

Open and personal communication improves social relationships and builds friendship. Research has shown that good social relationships and friendship in teams leads to greater task monitoring, cooperation, and commitment, all of which improve task performance. Based on findings from more than 5 million interviews, the Gallup organization has found that people with best friends at work are also more satisfied and productive. In R&D organizations, project success has been found to be strongly linked to open communication within and across project teams (see Sloan Management Review article; pdf).

In virtual teams, too, frequent and open communication is vital for improving relationships and team performance. Blogs can help facilitate frequent and open communication. A friend of mine who took up blogging to stay connected with her teammates during her travels shared the following story with me.

When traveling, I create blog posts to share my experience.  It creates a different type of conversation; rather than focusing on business download they tend to be more all-encompassing.  One blog post may include an overview of how unions are viewed in China – and also a quick update on a killer deal I got shopping or my own clumsiness with local culture.  I am amazed how much it helps my team conversations.  My team used to think that my traveling was glamorous and often done at their sake.  Now, they understand the hard work that happens on the road.  They also feel very included in each lag of the trip.  The blogs allow easy communication across 12-hour different time zones.  I’ll post my daily reflections and go to sleep.  When I wake up, rather than grabbing a newspaper and wondering what is happening back in the US, I grab my computer and read what my group is up to.

The above story gives us an indication of how the sharing of experiences facilitated by blogs can improve understanding among co-workers and improve relationships. Leading Virtually readers may also recall the story of Ms. Stephanie Nielson, a blogger who built strong bonds with distant and anonymous readers by sharing her life experiences on her blog.

How to increase blogging at work

So what can business and virtual team leaders do to increase the adoption and use of blogs in their work settings?

  1. Form a small team of co-workers to take up blogging with. Ideally, the co-workers you invite to blog should be those who love experimenting with new technology.
  2. Your team should make a conscious attempt to blog frequently – say, once every day. The blogs posts don’t have to be long. But they should be authentic and personal. Sharing experiences, thoughts, plans, and reactions to recent happenings make ideal candidates for blog posts. Project and status updates normally provided via email may also be good candidates for blog posts.
  3. Track indicators of engagement among individuals touched by the blogs. 360-degree feedback of those who have taken up blogging may also be tracked. These measures can be used to assess the impact of blogging.
  4. Use the measurements to fine tune the blogging effort and help your team of bloggers succeed.
  5. Use the story of your success to spread the message of advantages of blogs. Success stories that are backed by numbers can be very persuasive.

Summary

I have often been challenged about the utility of blogging in a corporate setting. In my view, there are numerous benefits that businesses can achieve through communication that is facilitated by blogs. With increasing competition and pressure to do more with less, corporations should seriously look at blogs as a tool that can increase organizational performance.

Article written by

Surinder Kahai is an Associate Professor of MIS and Fellow of the Center for Leadership Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. He has a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay), an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. Surinder has an active research program on leadership in virtual teams, computer-mediated communication and learning, collaboration in virtual worlds, CIO leadership, and IT alignment. His research has been published in several journals including Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Group & Organization Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management Information Systems, Leadership Quarterly, and Personnel Psychology. He is currently serving on the editorial boards of Group and Organization Management, IEEE-TEM, and the International Journal of e-Collaboration. He co-edited a Special Issue of Organizational Dynamics on e-leadership and a Special Issue of International Journal of e-Collaboration on Virtual Team Leadership. Surinder has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Surinder has spoken on and consulted with several organizations in the U.S. and abroad on the topics of virtual team leadership, e-business, and IS-business alignment, and IS strategy and planning

3 Responses

  1. nachiket.pandya@gmail.com
    nachiket.pandya@gmail.com at |

    I agree with this post. Last year our company started blogging on our business rules (technology) practice. It has served as a valueable marketing tool when we present to prospective clients.
    I think its a great channel to communicate and bounce ideas to internal as well as external players (obviously, the rules of posting for internal consumption and external consumption have to be different).

  2. Andrew Meyer
    Andrew Meyer at |

    The problem with blogging is one of getting contributors. I’ve seen various studies and believe that the percentage of active bloggers is about 3% of people who follow blogs. Commenter are around 10-15%. This is true from blogger to YouTube.

    The percentages just kill you in a corporation. Add to that the bias that the politics of an organization will have on the information and what is passed will not improve communications all that much.

    You won’t end up with a bell-curve of increased communications, what you’ll end up with is some sort of a bimodal graph. People whinging on one side and brown nosing on the other.

    I know two people who are both active bloggers who have made efforts to get people inside their companies to blog. They both work for large companies 10,000+. They both have excellent technologies for blogging, recognize the benefits and have had virtually zero success getting people to blog for any sustained period of time.

    For those of us who make the effort and enjoy engaging in the exchange of ideas, it’s great, but it’s unlikely blogging will cross the chasm. Great if it does, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still a great tool for sharing ideas.

    I would love to be proved wrong. If you have cases where companies have introduced blogging and gotten people to blog and comment over a sustained period of time, I would love to learn why it succeed inside of a company.

Please comment with your real name using good manners.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.