Blogging as a business tool: Does it work for you?
Published 12 Sep 2005
I am about to embark on a project that to me seems a little hard to grasp: blogging at work, as part of my job. I am so used to blogging being a personal project that I go to great efforts to distinctly separate from my work life, that I have a feeling it will be difficult to switch gears.
We have recently decided to increase the avenues of communication between the Web Office and the rest of the university, so folks have a better idea of what we’re working on and a way to give feedback. This naturally lends itself to a Web Office blog. We haven’t gone this route before, because while “Web Office” is a nice optimistic name, ours consists of one person: me. We always figured it was more efficient for me to do work than to talk about doing work. This, however, is not always the case.
So, the Web Office blog will be born in the next couple of weeks. This concept is not a new one— I have seen several work blogs, and some blogs used to communicate about specific projects, such as Ohio State’s Redesign Blog and A New Arizona.edu.
I have a few questions for those of you that have experience with work blogs, and for those of you like me who may be contemplating setting one up for the fist time.
- How much time do you devote to keeping up your work blog?
- Do you find that your work blog is worth the effort?
- Do you allow comments, and if so do you moderate them? Do you allow anonymous comments?
- Have you had as much participation from the campus as you anticipated?
- How did you get the word out about your blog?
Any other insight or thoughts that you have are welcome, as well.
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Commentary
Prabhath writes
Sep 12 at 09:47 AM #
We thought of having a blog for Vesess some time back, but then gave up that idea when we realized we didn’t have much to say anyway (most of it was already told on our personal blogs). A major concern for a business blog (or for any blog for that matter) is the risk of it fizzling out, when the interest dies. If you’re the whole “web office”, it’s a good idea to have a proper idea of what’s going to be there on the blog, how often you’ll have to post to keep the interest up, and whether that content will be useful (of course you already knew that – perhaps it’s high time I started following my own “advice :D ). A business blog adds to stress, that’s for sure.
Andrea writes
Sep 13 at 09:05 PM #
Prabhath; Yeah, that’s my biggest concern—trying to keep interest up. And trying to do that while not spending immense amounts of time on the blog that I could be spending Getting Things Done™. We’ll see what happens I guess…
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