Well, I should have written this post when I was leading the corporate blogging initiative at my company, sometime ago. This blog was seen literally as the ‘informal‘ communications medium where all those under a particular regional group can share their thoughts – be it business or entertainment or just plain rant!
It was quite a challenging task, coz’ more than 80% of those in the regional group never knew what one could do with a blog; ahem, did I mention that I work for a big technology company? When we introduced the concept of corporate blogging to the user community of the regional group (close to 700 people!), many of them had an account with Blogspot – probably, since everyone had a Google Mail account, they would’ve created a blog, unknowingly or just for the heck of it.
Following are the observations made during one such ‘awareness‘ session:
- People that thought..
- that a blog is purely personal – a personal diary visible to friends and relatives – 43%
- Blogger is the only platform that’s available on the WWW – 69%
- WordPress is just another blogging platform – 29%
- WordPress exists as wordpress.com and wordpress.org - 2%
- TypePad is for rich and affluent bloggers – no answer
- MovableType – Well, what’s that? – 97%
- corporate blogging is a new concept – 90%
- articles on corporate blogs cannot be moderated like in forums – 52%
- authors can stay anonymous while they rant on corporate blogs – 34%
- blogging is an art – 100%
- corporate blogging decreases their productivity – 65%
- corporate blogging increases their ‘yearly pay raise‘ percentage – 86%
- Not my cup of tea. Let those that want to blog, blog.. – 62%
- corporate blogging is nothing but CCP (cut/copy and paste!) – 89%
Sample size, N = 112
So, now you’d have got an idea of what (corporate) people think of blogs. Technorati reports a whopping number of blogs created every minute and every week. I was astonished to see the results of this (informal – results not shared with the organization!) survey. When the whole world is talking about e-governance, voice of the people and so on, there’s this huge bunch of people, slogging in a big IT company – not knowing the power of blogging.
This is the set of those people that are looked upon as the ones that could bring about progressive changes in the society..
Nice survey! I’ve agree to the 4th point. I never knew that there was something like wordpress.org
I really had to laugh out loud at the last one – “◦corporate blogging is nothing but CCP (cut/copy and paste!)” – yet it is true that most people just copy and paste articles from informationweek, BBC and Yahoo, since the blog is internal!!
Nice stuff! we’ve corporate blogging at our organization too, and it’s very effective as a communications medium since ours is a very small company with 40-60 employees. And, there is absolutely no plagiarism at all. People write articles about their own stuff, our company’s competitors, a new restro-bar that has come up and so on. It’s actually a time-pass for me to peep into the blog pages every now and then when I’m stressed out. Blogging is, of course, an art!
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