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How we use blogs internally
via Go Big Always by sam on May 11, 2008
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.
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