Guardian Unlimited :: Why blogs could be bad for business
In this Guardian article Neil McIntosh points out that while companies might not be rushing out to embrace weblogging as a corporate interface to their customers that they would be well advised to utilize weblogging as an internal tool for Knowledge Management.
...In today's corporate culture, where knowledge is power, the information-sharing capabilities of weblogs may not be entirely welcome, writes Neil McIntosh. ... Could the weblog confessions of a businessperson really boost the bottom line? It's something I've been asking a lot since going to a conference on the subject this summer in Boston. Blogdom's biggest names turned up for the Jupiter-organised event, from the always-controversial Dave Winer of the Berkman Center at Harvard University, to everyone's favourite Microsoft employee (by dint of her blog), Beth Goza. ...
The notion that more than a few companies might relax their external relations strategies enough to allow weblog communication, willy-nilly, between staff members and the outside world, is absurd, no matter how many consultants insist such communication might actually have a beneficial effect on a company's image. ...
This, of course, all presumes weblogs are to be used as something that faces customers, employed in some rather vague corner of a company's marketing mix. But all this does not rule out using weblogs internally, in some kind of knowledge management effort, and it is in this field that they show some potential....
K-Collector