Corporate Blogging: The 5 types of Intranet Blogs

There is broad confusion around web 2.0 initiatives inside the firewall, as demonstrated by the squishiness of the terms used to describe the trends – enterprise 2.0, intranet 2.0, social computing, “The Corporate Facebook” etc.

Regardless of the term you use, blogs tend to be a component of this renewed attention to intranets. Adding to this terminology confusion is that people use one term - “blogging” - to describe several very different activities.

We differentiate between five types of internal blogging initiatives:

• Executive Blogs – senior executives write blogs hoping employees will pay attention
• Blogs by Subject Matter Experts – the most knowledgeable employees in the company are recruited to record their knowledge for posterity
• Facilitated Blogging – designated writers interview hand-on employees on how they do their jobs in an attempt to capture the tacit knowledge that is going to disappear when the boomers retire.
• Spontaneous Blogs – corporations encourage anyone with any interest, level of expertise or ability to articulate a thought to author a blog and publish it for consumption by other employees
• Repatriated External Blogs – most organizations find (sometimes to their horror) that employees are already blogging. Out there. On the internet. In public. Some executives sleep better if these blogs are brought behind the firewall.

These blogs differ in:

• The business benefits they deliver
• The motivations of the authors
• The risks associated with their introduction

Over the next week or so, we’ll post discussions of each blog type, their advantages and disadvantages for business.