I'm pulling some information straight from our book, Realty Blogging, for this post. It outlines several more benefits to using blogs for internal communications. (See previous posts on this topic here and here.)

Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Technology & Communications and co-author of Blogging for Business, says that "whatever succeeds on the Internet will find its way to the intranet." Much of what has been said about the effective use of blogs as a marketing tool also applies to internal communications.

Ease of Use
Before the advent of blogging technology, many existing intranets were not used in the way they were intended because the existing software was often difficult to learn and required participants to fit their information into inflexible existing categories. Current blog technology is easy to use, with a very simple learning curve. If you can create a Microsoft Word document or send an email, you can create a blog post. Any and all organizational users can participate.

Mike Wing, IBM's Vice President of Internet Strategy, believes their simplicity and informality could give them an edge in office communication. "It may be an easy, comfortable medium for people to be given permission to publish what they feel like publishing." Fast Company, April 2004.

Flexibility
Using a blog, things like user privileges and administrative levels, categories and other setup features can be established in just a few minutes. This permits information to be quickly created and posted in an efficient manner. For example, in most blog platforms, categories can be added in real-time as the blog post is being written.

Simplicity
IT departments pride themselves on their ability to manage complex software applications and data management systems. One key to the usefulness of blogs for intranet purposes is that they don't require vast IT resources to get them up and running. That bodes well for real estate brokerages or associations that may not have internal IT resources or a large budget to devote to such.

Cost Effectiveness
Blogs don't cost a great deal to deploy. Sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS) can cost multiplied thousands whereas blogs cost only a few hundred to a few thousand, depending on the number of blogs deployed.

Technology company Infoworld was presented with a quarter-million dollar quote by a vendor for an intranet portal application, even though the need for such an expensive piece of software had not been identified within the company. After further discussion, they opted for a blog solution instead.

Regarding the decision, Chief Technology Officer Chad Dickerson said, "Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we're beginning to see more tangible benefits as we've begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors." The company now considers the use of blogs as "indispensable."

Archiving of Information
Think about the information currently stored within a typical organization. Isn't some of it trapped in email boxes that no one will ever see again or stuck in long forgotten databases? Blogs support infinite archiving of information, both by topic (category) and date. Most blog platforms allow content to be searched as well, making blogs the perfect tool for managing the intellectual property of an organization. Files associated with blog posts can be stored within the blog for later retrieval.

Email Saver
According to Nicholas Tang, Director of Operations at Community Connect, an online builder of U.S. ethnic community sites, the deluge of work related email messages can be overwhelming. "It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of emails a day, sometimes more than a thousand." (The New York Times, July 7, 2003).

Community Connect's solution was to implement a blog. Mr. Tang's engineers send content updates to their private blog viewable by the authors and their managers, including time and date stamps and often with links to relevant websites. "When I want to know something I check the (blog). It saves me the trouble of emailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update."

A blog accomplishes these results without filling up email inboxes all across the organization and/or workgroups. Intranet blogs also eliminate the scourge of email ' spam. In a password protected environment only real and appropriate content can make it to the blog site.

Not only that, through the use of companion technology RSS (Really Simple Syndication), blog posts can be syndicated and distributed to members without the threat of them being captured by spam filters or sequestered to the junk mail folder.

Build Community
Blogs can be used to establish a sense of community within an organization. An intranet blog can give voice to many authorized individuals, and allow each to publish content on his or her blog. In addition, such posts can also be added by each individual to the overall community blog, and assigned to specific categories or topics.

An intranet community blog can create a social environment within the walls of an organization or association that enables staff to connect in a manner unavailable in any other online medium. This community emphasis can have its own business purpose.

BlogCentral, an internal IBM blog program, enables employees to keep personal blogs. Brian Doyle, a spokesman for IBM says, "We're a company of experts. We're about encouraging these people to interact, and that leads to breakthrough thinking and innovation." KansasCity.com, March 14, 2006.

Intranet blogs are unlike most corporate intranets in that they are a bottom-up approach which fosters wide staff participation. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more," according to Halley Suitt who wrote a fictional case study on corporate blogging for the Harvard Business Review (Fast Company, April 2004).

This permission-based content levels the playing field within the organization and allows all staff members to feel like part of the team. Think of your intranet blog as a town square where your staff meet, "speak" and interact more effectively and more often than previously practical.

I'm going to do one more post on this subject which will discuss ways to use blogs for internal or associational communications. It is scheduled to run later this week.