How we use blogs internally
New employee introduction
There’s a tradition at Jive that all new folks post a “First” blog. Some do “My first week at Jive.” Some do first month or even keep the idea going after that “First year,” etc. Right off the bat, the new employee starts getting comments from people and many folks now are aware of them. We like this more than marching new people around to meet everyone.
Meeting notes
The problem with traditional meeting notes is that one person sums everything up and may have missed some perspective in that summary. Also, traditionally folks can’t add their two cents. It’s pretty valuable when I post about a business call I’ve had and numerous people chime in with ideas or connections they have. We also like it because as the meeting is going, if there are tasks that are brought up, we can use Clearspace’s task feature to assign those right from our notes. Ongoing notes can also be part of the project feature inside Clearspace so that it’s resident to something specific we’re cranking on.
Competitive insight
Internal blogging is a great way to stay on top of the market. More than just news feeds, we like to capture whatever we’re hearing from customers and prospects and share it with the company. This could be notes from a sales call, rumors, predictions, interesting public blog posts or news. We also have a lot of cool RSS feeds inside Clearspace which pulls public news inside our company to give us visibility for conversations currently going on about our competitors.
Status reports
Most teams at Jive use blogging to update everyone on what their goals are for the week, though some use a wiki-document. Either way, it’s a great way to stay up to date on what’s going on vs. having to go to a status meeting which are colossal wastes of time. Our head of Sales even posts the week’s revenue numbers in a blog.
Props
Another tradition we have at Jive is to give people props. When someone has gone above and beyond we like to recognize them. By posting a blog about it, it makes everyone aware and gives people an easy way to chime in and add comments. We even have a blog post as part of our All-Hand weekly meeting where we add special props we can talk about in person. There’s even been rumor of a props feature that might be built into our product.
Ideas
Whenever someone has a new product idea or idea about something we should do as a company, they blog about it. Most of the best ideas we have start this way and a lot of them have turned into real product features or company activities. I also love that these ideas come from all over the company.
Project updates
One of my favorite uses for blogging internally is when I get sneak peeks into interesting stuff. Our designers will post mock ups, Professional Services will show a super cool customization they’re doing, Engineers will share their stuff (ok, most of the time that’s over my head). It’s really powerful to see this work in progress and I love that folks have the chance to comment before the work is too-far done.
How to
I’ve noticed that there are a category of posts that seem to answer repetitive requests or overall interest. We might show something in staff that everyone wants to know how we pulled off, IT might have a new trick for turning on better spam protection, we might have a new process we want to show for expense reports. Whatever the case, posting a blog about it saves the millions of questions and emails and lets people voice their opinions.
Roll-call
Everyday our operations person does a micropost about who’s in or out for the day. I’ve noticed it works well also because there are folks who can add comments to adjust their information if they were accidentally excluded or in San Diego vs New York.
Goofing off
Yes, there are fun posts (thank god). Pics from our Happy Hours, funny videos, stupid stuff like kidnapping pics from the Swedish Fish thief. Regardless, these infuse a lot of life into our work.
This week in Brewspace
Our internal instance of Clearspace is called “Brewspace” and once a week I get a digest email of all the top posts for the week. I love getting this in case there’s something popular I missed. It’s a great way to stay connected.
More
I’m forgetting stuff. I came up with this list after looking at 24 hours worth of posts so I’m sure there’s much more but hopefully this offers some insight for how we use internal blogging and you could, too.
Things people have said about this post
Hi Sam. Those are all great reasons for sharing internal content. I have a few questions:
- You mentioned new hire introduction, so is it safe to say ALL Jive employees have a blog? If so, what % are active? (and I guess the definition of active is subjective)
- Are all blogs accessible to everyone, or are any restricted?
- How do you access the blogs? Is there a central “home page” that aggregates new posts, or do you just use the RSS reader of your choice?
Over 15 years ago there was an article that I read about status reports that was very insightful. What it recommended I have attempted to get implemented repeatedly to no avail. The newer ‘transparency’ of 2.0 exchanges begins to help accomplish the goals recommended.
In the case of the article, it suggested a section called “Weather Report” (or somehow I translated the recommendation to that). Effectively it was a section to add emotion to a sterile report. It was the more ‘informal’ and more accurate reflection of what was really going on. An individual could express their frustrations/challenges. aided by the analogy of weather conditions. It didn’t mean that details weren’t added, but they were done so in a way that didn’t necessarily expose everything and simply suggested to management, ‘you might want to look into this’ — or ‘everything is great here’.
@Alan
* All employees have a blog and at Jive 80% of our employees have posted.
* Some blogs are open, some are part of a project, some are restricted to a space and the people who have access to that space.
* Blog are built into Clearspace so they show up in many ways. I find a lot of them in the activity feeds. As well, each space has a way to display all the blogs of that space. You can also view them in a project. If you follow people, their posts show up in that widget. You can also add the RSS feed for a blog (or anything else in Clearspace) to your reader.
Can I still order the IBM “electronic calculator”? Are you guys making fun of IBM???
From an active Jive blogger: Great list Sam, with a couple I hadn’t thought of as well.
I think I only ever post to the goofing off category.
I’m an active internal blogger at a company that uses Jive, and I think my use cases on internal blogging fit into multiple categories above. My personal interests at work revolve around things like company culture, personal and group interactions, and management style. So I write about my work as it relates to those things. Sometimes it’s interesting to other people, sometimes it’s not. So not sure if that fits your categories or not, except it’s sort of like a Project Update. Not about any one project, just about life at work.
Thanks for the great list Sam. I’ve really been encouraging people to use their internal blogs more here at FG SQUARED, and its been great to see it take off. There was a lot of goofing off type posts at first, but more and more we’re using it for most of the reasons you have listed above. In particular, the project update type posts are becoming an extremely useful way of keeping up with status.
Sam,
Thank you for sharing this. I found a number of useful ideas. I hope to see more thought leadership from Jive on how to use social networking features within the enterprise to improve productivity.
I think that Jive is uniquely positioned to lead by example (and thought) in this space.
I’m going to steal your list.
Interesting ideas, Sam! Thanks for sharing that with us. I have been thinking about this a bit. My employer (Capgemini) has over 80.000 employees. Having 80% of them actively blogging would pose a bit of a problem. There would be too little time to read all that would be written. I usually only read the blogs from people I know. It is simply impossible to stay connected with the entire company. So I have to be selective. But I can see how it could work for groups (departments and communities) within Capgemini.
I have also pondered over on http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog
Really interesting post, Sam.
I’m thinking about internal blog use a lot at the moment. I have a (team) blog, but (as far as I know) it’s the only one in the organisation. I use it for a fairly substantial subset of the possible uses you list.
However, being the only blogger is pretty lonely! I link to content on our intranet (when it’s relevant, which is depressingly rarely), but apart from that it exists in isolation. People are pretty reticent about commenting (they tend to email me instead!). I’m keen to expand blogging in the organisation so that a real conversation can develop, and because I think it has enormous potential for improving the flow of knowledge and insight through the organisation.
Mark - I think trying to read everything that gets blogged in an organisation is always going to be impossible (unless there’s only a single blog, of course!). Like the wider blogosphere, the best/most interesting content will come to your attention because it’ll be linked to and discussed more broadly.
Sam says ‘once a week I get a digest email of all the top posts for the week. I love getting this in case there’s something popular I missed’ - perhaps that kind of digest may be a solution for a really bigCo blog network?
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