A blogworker paradise
According to the April issue of Technology Review, from the MIT, the company which has the best understanding of the blogging phenomenon is… Sun Microsystems. In this article, Wade Roush tells us that “more than 1,000 of Sun’s 32,000 employees blog about their work.”
Here are some excerpts from this article.
Most companies are still cautious when it comes to communicating with mainstream media outlets; employees are seldom allowed to speak with journalists without media-relations chaperones. But blogs have emerged as an exception, with more and more companies concluding that the public-relations benefits outweigh the risks.
One of those companies is Sun Microsystems, which promotes employee blogging more aggressively than any other technology firm. “Sun’s employees are our most passionate evangelists,” says Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and chief operating officer and the author of a company blog read by tens of thousands of visitors every month. “From where I sit, the more our investors and customers know about us, the better.”
Of course, Sun is a high-tech company where the atmosphere leads to spontaneity and to risk taking. Other companies have cultures or modes of communication much more rigid and their employees are not allowed to publish blogs. But this can lead to some disadvantages.
Here is Wade Roush’s conclusion .
But consumer-oriented companies that abjure the blogosphere are missing out on opportunities to generate buzz, monitor customer concerns, and — perhaps most importantly — show their human side. As Schwartz puts it, “Any company that feels threatened by blogs probably feels threatened by the Internet.”
You’ll find a selection of Sun bloggers at blogs.sun.com. Here is the motto.
Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
Pretty clear, isn’t?
