Which companies are blogging internally?

December 5, 2007 5:56 AM

Which companies are blogging internally?

I'm doing some research for my company on internal blogging. I've found plenty of theory on the internet but, perhaps not surprisingly, very few examples of companies that are actually doing it. (For the purposes of this question, I'm excluding any staff blogging in the public domain, such as IBM and Sun.)

All I really need is a list of the names of companies that are doing this -- although more information on content, design and adoption would obviously be a bonus. My focus is on big corporates and multinationals, but in any sector. Anyone better informed on this than me?

Thanks in advance for your help.

posted by londonmark to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Would it also be useful to hear why some internal blogging initiatives failed? I've seen a number of these projects get off the ground only to slowly (or not so slowly) die from neglect. In most cases, the blogging enthusiasts just assumed that momentum would propel the initiative along, which didn't happen.

One company I know had a failed beginning, but then gave it a second try with two changes: 1. They made it a specific job responsibility for a handful of people to post certain types of information to the blog on a regular basis, and 2. They put some company info on the blog and nowhere else, to get people in the habit of visiting it. That time, it took.
posted by j-dawg at 6:41 AM on December 5, 2007

Response by poster: Hmm, pitfalls. Yes, I once thought it would be good to have a blog and quickly ran out of things to say! By all means, please share your thoughts on that too, although I do have a specific need to benchmark current business practice if possible.
posted by londonmark at 6:48 AM on December 5, 2007

I work for the largest consulting firm on the planet. We blog internally. That's all I will say here, but my email is in my profile, if you shoot me a note I'll let you in on what I'm allowed to (I'll be looking into that in the meantime, but I have to guess it won't be that much detail...).
posted by allkindsoftime at 6:49 AM on December 5, 2007

IBM has an internal tool too. It's called BlogCentral, which you can google.
posted by smackfu at 6:56 AM on December 5, 2007

the World Bank has a number of blogs, the first one launched, if i'm not mistaken, was the Private Sector Development blog
posted by barrakuda at 8:05 AM on December 5, 2007

I work for HP, and there is a thriving internal blog community talking about both work and non-work details. It's great having a place to track competitors, post about your work, and talk about that great vacation you just got back from.
posted by cschneid at 8:26 AM on December 5, 2007

Amazon has a basic internal blogging system.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:53 AM on December 5, 2007

MSFT has an internal blog system as well.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:00 AM on December 5, 2007

As a fellow HPer, I'll confirm what cschneid said.
posted by mmascolino at 11:01 AM on December 5, 2007

As a former employee of Intuit, I can say that they have good amount of blogging going on.
posted by sideshow at 11:57 AM on December 5, 2007

Best answer: A huge part of my job for the last five years has been helping companies adopt blogs internally as collaboration and communications tools.

Some of the larger companies that I've had first-hand experience discussing internal blogging with include Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Boeing, Google, Oracle, Nokia, General Motors, Wells Fargo, Genentech, Agency.com, L'Oreal, the U.S. Census Bureau, Pfizer, and many more.

For specifics on what internal blogging deployments can look like, you can find some good details on internal deployment at ad agency TWBA (almost 10,000 employees) and clothing retailer UNIQLO (over 700 retail stores), and technology company Casio (over 3,200 employees). You can see a list of many more companies using blogs in business this way here, although some of those are for public-facing blogs, not internal blogs, and many, many large companies internal deployments are not listed there. (A lot of companies are very secretive about the fact they use blogs internally.)

There are a lot of points to consider when it comes to content, design and adoption. In the interest of not leaving toolong an answer here, if you don't mind the self-link, I'll link to some resources I wrote about these topics:

• An intro to business blogging and a checklist for getting started.
• Some stats on business blog adoption and how blogs compare to other communication tools.
• How to create a corporate blogging policy.

This is a really large topic of discussion, and can lend itself to infinite debates, but feel free to get in touch if I can help you do more research. (Full disclosure: I work for Six Apart, which makes Movable Type, which is likely the most popular platform for these kinds of internal blogging situations. So, I clearly have a vested interest in this sort of thing, but that's only because I think it's important.)
posted by anildash at 2:43 PM on December 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

When you say "staff blogging in the public domain", do you mean companies blogging FOR the public, or company blogs that are more internal but just happen to be public?

Because the KaosPilot International Board has a blog that's more of the latter.
posted by divabat at 1:17 AM on December 6, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for your comments and help; you've given me a lot to work on and think about.
posted by londonmark at 2:57 AM on December 6, 2007

Blogging at Yahoo! is pretty common. Some individuals have their own internal blogs for brainstorming or venting, others are run by project teams to keep the rest of the company up-to-date on what they're working on. It's very common for a new project to get a blog where people could track the activity, and there's an internal feed aggregator for pulling together all the posts into a single place.
posted by waxpancake at 12:42 PM on December 22, 2007