As you are reading this blog post, you have evidently found my blog. I am a Manager Internal Communications, and this is an external blog. Let me explain. I started blogging in our own organization around two years ago. Our department launched the Corporate Communications Blog, mainly to learn about blogging ourselves and to ‘lead by example’. There are now around 30 dedicated internal blogs at Océ, some of them very successful, many of them with a small, but dedicated group of followers, and some of them in a state of near-death.
So, our example worked, but our own blog ‘dried up’ a few months ago. Maybe we felt that we had done our job. Maybe running a department blog is hard. Who knows. Anyway, since I am not involved in that blog anymore, it freed up some time to finally launch an external blog. I am a member all kinds of social networks, and being a communicator, I apparently feel the urge to now and then go beyond the 140 characters and share my views with the world. Ah, vanity…, I am only human, you know.
So, I finally started a blog the other day, and once again I was struck by how easy it is. I set up a blog in 5 minutes, made choices about the design, added and deleted widgets, made custom settings, made rss-feeds available, and so on. Wow, I am a 48 old digital immigrant, who used a typewriter at University. Five years ago I would have needed the help of a designer, a programmer, a hosting service, and who knows who else, and I would have probably paid a large amount of money for this help.
Nowadays it just takes five minutes to make a blog. I used Blogger, the Google tool, but the same goes for Wordpress. They made it so easy for us. And, why call it a blog? With a few alterations I can make it look like a website. No wonder the world of communications is changing. This is what they mean with ‘the consumerization of IT’: everyone can do it. This trend is, of course, well documented and discussed everywhere, but for me it is still too early to take this all for granted. What a development in just a few years! I love it.
And our internal blogs? We made a template available, 30 site owners just took off, never to be seen by our department again. They are all doing a great job communicating internally to a well-targeted and dedicated group of readers.
Help, I will be out of a job soon. Anyone needs a web designer?
Jan, It's really good to have you in the blogosphere. Your experiences are mine as well and are shared by all bloggers. Hopefully more will follow your example as well!
ReplyDeleteHi Jan, I was reading this article about the end of the web (page): http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
ReplyDeleteIntranets are also moving away from the 'green fields' situation were intranet experts actually built an intranet. Now we’re moving to pre-formatted, 'sleeker' services that just work.
Online publishing/dialogue is becoming easy. Creating a great place to work (at a profit) is challenging.
Hi Jeroen,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip. I will check it out. Yes, I agree with you. I would love to see examples of major organizations that get it right.