Because technology is changing rapidly, this means that the way people communicate - both personally and professionally - is changing rapidly as well. Corporations that used to rely on pen and paper and the U.S. post office have advanced to voicemail, e-mail, and even instant messaging to make sure that employees are connected to volumes of information at any given second. Some companies are even looking even beyond e-mail and instant messaging to other new ways of communicating electronically: through blogs (Web logs), podcasts, wikis, discussion boards and streaming video, among other means. Indeed new ways of communicating digitally are being developed at a fast pace and with greater speed.
But are these new technologies useful or just distracting? Just because a medium is available does not necessarily mean that a need exists for it. While having a blog or a podcast may be important to a technology-based company such as Apple or Microsoft, does it have the same importance in other companies that do not concern themselves primarily with new media technologies?
The advent of these new technologies poses several problems. Many technologies, such as the discussion forum and the blog, allow for a high level of interactivity from users. When used in an adult manner, feedback and discussion ican be very beneficial. But when the first user writes something slanderous or replies in an unprofessional manner, the usefulness of the tool decays as responses get edited and feedback gets diluted.
This study focuses on one such mode of communicating electronically, through blogs. Although reports now indicate that people use them more frequently, do they take blogs seriously? Do they feel a blog is an appropriate forum to stay in touch with his or her workforce, or do they consider it too informal? Because people differ in the extent to which they use blogs, will a knowledge gap accrue among the usually technologically-savvy bloggers versus those who do not?
What are blogs?
The Webster's dictionary defines a Web log as "a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page."
That the use of Web logs is exploding can be exemplified on Technorati.com, a Web site that tracks blogs and the topics that are being discussed within them. It first began tracking blogs in November 2002, when it was tracking a mere 13,000 blogs.Just three years later it reports that more than 20 million blogs went through its system. Only six months prior to that, the site hit the 10 million mark (Weil, 2006). As of November 2006, Technorati says it monitored almost 60 million blogs. (Technorati: about us, 2006)
Although most blogs are personal in nature, its uses have permeated the corporate world as well. Companies that have a lot invested in technology (i.e. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, IBM) are the forerunners in this category, but companies that have other primary interests (i.e. Pfizer, the Berkshire Publishing Group, the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks) are beginning to jump into the bandwagon. It is clear, therefore, that blogs are becoming prevalent.
There are several types of corporate blogs: internal (to employees only), external (to customers and shareholders), blogs written by CEOs/executives and blogs written by employees. External employee blogs seem to be pretty rare; Microsoft is one of the few companies that allow its employees to blog fairly freely. (Weil, 2006). Many companies do not advocate blogs, even personal ones that do not address company information, and will inflict severe penalties, including termination, on employees found to have one. Internal blogs written by the average employee are not very common either at least not yet. What most corporations appear to be utilizing blogs for right now are external communications to customers and internal communications to team members.
Corporate blog pros:
Large companies (and even small ones) have such a collective wealth of information that it is nearly impossible to share it all with every single employee in the company, especially in an effective manner. In my experience as a communicator at a large company, mass e-mails are usually very impersonal and are phrased in "corporate speak", which a large number of employees have no tolerance for. The popularity of "Buzzword Bingo" and television shows such as The Office, which skewers cubicle life, proves that the corporate world and all of the buzzwords that go with it leaves something to be desired to a good deal of the workforce. Employees have become so frustrated with whitewashing and corporate speak that I believe they may start to tune it out after a while. Because of their informal, diary-like tone, blogs can help Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and their direct reports become human to their employees again while still accomplishing the goal of sending pertinent information to the masses.
This is a plus for blogs that I feel is underrated, at least in very large companies where the executives are just names. A blog can help the image of a company leader and establish that they are regular people who talk and write just like the average Joe does. (Flynn, 2006)
For executives who want to stay in touch with those who are actually "in the field" every day, blogs are an "unparalleled information-gathering mechanism" (Weil, p. 134) that connects them with the water-cooler buzz that they probably don't have access to otherwise - at least not in large companies where the executives may not even work in the same country as many of the employees.
Another point for advocating blogs is that executives can not only send important information, but receive it as well. The CEO of Pfizer said he receives 75 e-mails a day from employees who tell him what competitors are doing, which is an incredible source of information for him. (Wall Street Journal, 2005) If he had a blog, he would have the same line of valuable communication straight from the employees, but would have it all in one place and could tailor the topic to get team member responses about a specific concern or issue.
When you compare that kind of customization to 525 weekly e-mails about topics that range wildly and may not be a matter the CEO wants or needs feedback on, you see that blogs can greatly increase effeciency and decrease time wasted on needless e-mails.
Although e-mails are in the same vein as blogging - they are both essentially sending a message from one person to another - blogging is much more user-friendly. When publishing a message via e-mail or to a Web page, the process takes more than 40 steps. To publish to a blog that has already been set up, the process is cut down by 90 percent to four or five steps. (Kline and Burstein, 2005)
All of the reasons listed above for why blogs can increase CEO credibility, efficiency, visibility and even likeability lead me to another reason that blogs are for the savvy business: the executives get all of those positive results for an incredibly low price.
Compared to other communications strategies, blogs can be very affordable (Weil, 2006). The time and effort involved in putting together PowerPoint presentations, messages in hard-copy magazines and mass e-mails that have to go through an extensive approval process before being sent out can be quite costly when converted to man-hours. A blog is the time of one person, jotting down his or her thoughts. It can take five minutes, if that's the time the executive has, or it can take an hour.
Some pro-blog arguments state that blogging is not going to be an option executives will have the opportunity to consider in the future - they will be mandatory for companies who want customers and employees to take them seriously. "In ten years, most of us will communicate directly with customers, employees and the broader business community through blogs. For executives, having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than e-mail is today." (Schwartz, p.30) By that argument, then, it seems wise for companies to make the leap now and appear to be innovators, rather than hop on the bandwagon after most companies already have.
Corporate blog cons:
Although it seems blogging can only be beneficial for businesses, there is another side to the story. In a world that is increasingly litigation-happy, blogs might make it too easy for defamation and invasion of privacy or to breach information security.
A majority of employers surveyed are worried that corporate blogs may result in security breaches and loss of company confidentiality (Wired News, 2005). Although this is primarily a concern for external blogs, there is the potential for internal breaches of security as well. For instance, if upper management is considering downsizing and an executive says something that might allude to that in a blog without wording his or her thoughts carefully, mass chaos could erupt in the company.
A fear related to the one above is the fact that blogs mean companies would not have the rigid control over the message being sent out about their brand that they are used to having and expect to have. This very fear has stopped 22 percent of employers from starting a corporate blog (iUpload, 2005).
One issue corporations appear to have reservations about is loss of productivity. Even if employees are writing or reading a professional blog that pertains to work and the company, it is still taking time away from their "real" jobs. Although the blogs would be business-related, bosses may feel that their reports could use their time better elsewhere, perhaps making sales or collecting on delinquent accounts doing something that involves "real" money. This may boil down to different environments at different companies, but it is still a mindset that needs to be considered. Their fears may be justified according to a 2005 article in Ad Age, "35 million workers, or one in four employees, spend 3.5 hours, or nine percent of the work week, in the blogosphere." (Johnson, 2005) That research doesn't include the time an employee spends surfing the Internet on sites that aren't blogs. In terms an employer can relate to - money the cost of the average worker wasting two hours a day is a loss of $759 billion in productivity every year (Malachowski, 2005).
A major concern of executives from the writing standpoint is the amount of time it is going to take them to blog. While blogs can be ghostwritten, saving the executive time, people can typically tell when an executive is writing for himself or herself or if they are having a marketing or communications consultant write for him. Even if they can't tell immediately, they are extremely disillusioned when they do eventually find out the blogger hasn't really been writing entries and the blogger's credibility drops (Wielage, 2006). This fake blogging phenomenon is called "flogging". "Blogs that are written by dispassionate marketing professionals who are simply going through the motions of writing copy... are destined for failure, public ridicule and perhaps attack in the blogosphere." (Flynn, p. 86)
This research proves that if an executive says he or she is writing a blog, he or she really needs to be writing the blog. Executives may think that writing a blog themselves is going to take a huge chunk of time, which can be true for those who are not trained in proper grammar, spelling and linguistics. Executives who are more formal may have a hard time writing in an "off-the-cuff" manner and it may take them time to craft an appropriate blog entry perhaps wasting their time and therefore the company's money.
Another reason time is a valid concern is that for a blog to be successful, it must be updated frequently (Wielage, 2006). The number of times per week or per month is much debated but likely varies with the company, the topics and the person writing. If the executive is not comfortable with writing, providing content that frequently is going to be time-consuming.
If the problem is the staid executive, and the solution is to communicate more informally with employees, why can't that be done in formats that already exist within the company? Examples may include mass e-mails, intranet postings or company newsletters. Although the start-up costs of a blog may appear to be very small, someone has to maintain it at least minimally, especially if the executive writing the blog is not comfortable receiving real-time, unedited comments that most blog formats have. An employee would have to be salaried to maintain that blog when they had previously been using their time to be productive in other areas. A mass e-mail doesn't need anyone to maintain it and therefore does not cost manhours. Although one of the "pro" arguments says that an e-mail takes many more steps to complete, people in the corporate world send sometimes hundreds or e-mails every day with little trouble.
Another important variable in this research is age, which, surprisingly, is not a factor that was taken into consideration in most research on internal blogs. It stands to reason that a majority of older generations are not as comfortable using the Internet and related technologies as generations X, Y and those that followed. A study conducted by Perseus Development Corporation (see table below) found that the difference in percentages of teenagers and 20-somethings blogging versus bloggers ages 30 and up is significant.
(Perseus.com, 2005)
Age is not the only reason an employee would be uncomfortable commenting on or reading an executive blog - another variable is education levels. Team members who work in technology and have advanced degrees may be more comfortable with developing technologies, whereas team members who work on the loading dock and may not even have a high school education may not be comfortable with computers.
A third factor is the level that team members are engaged in their work for the company. Team members extremely devoted to work and the brand of the company are more likely to be interested in what their company leaders have to say about various developments. Team members who only work for the money and have nothing invested in their jobs might be more apt to overlook an executive blog.
The impact of corporate blogs on internal communications is growing every day. While they are not 100 percent accepted by corporations as of 2007, especially in traditional companies such as those in the financial industry, they do have a business use and that business use will be fully realized as the medium is finely honed and perhaps regulated to a degree. The answer to the problem/question are blogs a viable form of internal communications is that yes, they are beginning to be and they only have room to grow. Any form of communication that allows the top level to communicate more clearly with the lower levels and make them feel more included in the company will be successful. The potential is tremendous and the popularity of blogs will increase as technology-savvy people advance their careers.
