Without any content and an active audience, an internal blog is merely an empty platform, a blank slate waiting to be filled. When considering an internal blog as a solution for internal communication, business owners can easily look further ahead and visualize a highly organized and collaborative communication system, but this line of thinking skips a few steps.
Before you reach the point of optimal communication, you have to start somewhere. From our professional experience, getting started with internal blogging is often the most confusing part.
So, if you’re sitting and looking at a perfectly fine internal blogging platform, wondering how to make use of it - despair not! We have a whole bunch of ideas!
Before you begin
The way you use your internal blog will largely be decided by the nature of your business and a number of other company-specific factors. There’s probably one or more specific reasons why you’re considering an internal blog.
Whether it’s keeping your employees updated, collaborating more efficiently, optimizing the onboarding process, enabling easy knowledge transfer, or any other company-level issue you’re trying to resolve, you already know what your company’s communicational needs and priorities are.
A comprehensive internal blogging platform, allows anything from mass communication to one-on-one collaboration, with everything in between. Once you define the areas of need, the way to employ your internal blog will become far more clear.
Introduction
Whether you’ve already added other content to the blog prior to introducing it to your collective, you should always kick off its implementation with an introductory post. This is a way to let the employees know what’s the purpose of the internal blog and how you intend to use it.
You can highlight the individual sections relevant to your work (knowledge base, resources, policies, etc.) and explain how it all works and how the employees are expected to interact with it.
Think of how you want the employees to use the blog, and then think of all the information they will need to get there.
If you intend to use the blog for company-wide updates, you can pack it all in an update post or an internal newsletter, to give the employees a hint of what’s to come. In any case, the introduction post should set the ground rules and make it clear to all team members why is it important and how it will improve certain processes within the organization.
Company culture and policies
Most companies, regardless of their size and scope of work, employ an internal blog as a depository for various elements of company culture - its values, goals and mission statements, various policies, guidelines, and other documents that define the ideal state of the company.
Think of a new team member on their first day in the organization. The internal blog should be their go-to place for any information they may need to understand their new surroundings and their place in it.
Whether it’s setting up an email account and various other credentials, day-to-day office activities and etiquette, necessary tools and resources, general rules of behavior, or any other information relevant to the employee — it should all be there, on the internal blog.
Knowledgebase
Throughout its operations, every company generates a large body of knowledge and information that represents its overall know-how.
Ideally, this knowledge is recorded and stored in a centralized, easily searchable location, but that is not always the case.
The know-how is often scattered in various documents, email chains, and other random places, or — worst-case scenario — stored in the minds of a limited number of individuals.
Collaboration
Modern-day companies tend to communicate internally through a combination of email and chat tools. As both mediums tend to take up a life of their own and get overrun by trivial interactions, those most important pieces of information can be difficult to track down or even lost.
An internal blog can serve as a tidy location for all relevant work-related communication, whether for individual teams or on the company level. This can either be a static informative post, or a more collaborative effort where different team members can edit and contribute information provide feedback and commentary, share files, etc.
The BlogIn platform even allows easy integration with popular chat tools like Slack so you can have both the relevant work communication and the ongoing everyday discussion under the same roof.
Employee engagement
An internal blog can be a very powerful vehicle for employee engagement. It is a simple and convenient way to establish and maintain the information flow on the company level. Keeping your employees updated on all relevant developments and being transparent about it creates a relationship of trust.
Furthermore, you can use blog posts to highlight individual and team achievements, promote team spirit by sharing photos and videos from office life, team buildings and other shared activities, or even have a bit of light-hearted fun. It is up to you to get creative—these and countless other similar gestures and actions can help form a more personal and human bond between the company and its employees.
Of course, these are only some of the more common ways in which organizations employ an internal blog.
The blogging platform of your choice should enable you to customize and adjust it to suit your company’s needs in a number of different ways.
The important thing is to get started and then stick with it in order to create a habit of using the internal blog collectively. Over time, your internal blog will evolve to become a perfect foil for your business’ communicational and organizational needs.