The Dark Blogs
In Taking Blogs To The Corporate Masses, David Strom, the editor-in-chief of Tom’s Hardware Guide, analyses a Corante research report written by Suw Charman, “Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business” (PDF format, 28 pages, 2.29 MB). “The report is a case study of a large European pharmaceutical company’s implementation of Traction Software ’s TeamPage, a commercial blogging tool. Given that the report was paid for by Traction, you want to take a few of its conclusions with care.” Still, the deployment of blogs inside this large company was successful for two main reasons: an integration of the blogs with the e-mail system already in use, and a publishing process which includes links only visible to employees who have been given permission to access their content.
There are other reasons as well, but let’s focus on these two ones.
The company built its blogs (they had several underway, which shows you how useful they were) in such a way as to tie in with the corporate LDAP directory structure (for a single user login) and to provide email notifications when new entries were posted. I think both of these are big reasons for its success, because it wasn’t as technologically disruptive to the corporate culture as it could have been. Pharmas are big email consumers, and having a blog technology that fit in with their email habits was important.
Second, they ran their blog like we run our publishing mini-empire here at Tom’s, with an editor-in-chief and a publishing process that was well defined to get material from the individual author to the Web. A lot of people mistake this process with censorship or control of information, but the actual use (and what seems to be happening at this pharma company) is to polish and make the information readable and attractive and organized.
Please read Strom’s article if you don’t have enough time, or the full research report if you want to implement such a deployment.
And for your information, here are the prices for this software: Traction Communicator: $249 (2 named users, 3 pre-configured projects); Traction TeamPage-15: $4,995 (15 named users. 5 projects).
