Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Matías Fernández Dutto | weblog: Relaciones Públicas weblog
INTERNAL BLOGS

For this second edition of Global PR Blog Week, I present again my research and professional experience, focused in two actions levers for the public relations professional:

• The facilitation of change within those companies that adopt weblogs for internal and external communications.
• The necessity for corporate training of employees and partners to acquire the skills and capabilities needed to enhance effective conversations within the company and the market.

Before giving any particular perspective about the importance of internal blogs and the design of conversations internal communications programs, I would like to share three important keynote ideas have motivated me to write this article.

a) I strongly believe that a company must display an atmosphere of trust and commitment to be able to set up valuable relationships with all stakeholders

b) People are not resources within an organization. People are the organization. People are part of dynamic network of conversations which defines, grants identity, generates personality and makes any such organization distinct.

c) The communications skills and capabilities as well the way which members of the organization relate to their stakeholders, define what is possible and the company’s chances in the market, which may be seen in its economic profit or its mission or vision.

Apart from blogs specific characteristics, such us how fast content is delivered, their ease and practical use, their low implementation cost, the added value of associated technologies such as RSS, among others, the following is a list of the main benefits, and in my opinion the most representative, an organization gains when it integrates blogs in its internal communications programs.

• It improves participation spirit, collaboration, and the capabilities of team learning. It is ideal to run projects and to work with heterogeneous teams. It is also useful to promote dialogue and find lateral ideas outside the team.
• It allows integrating conversations with a shared vision. It is an excellent means for the leaders to communicate.
• It is the space where interpretations and different points of view come up so that the any member of the organization can discuss and debate them.
• It is an excellent means for the employees to achieve an integrated vision of the company by joining in conversations.
• It implies an open communication platform that allows new ways relating and coordinating actions among the organizational members and between the latter and the network of external relationships.
• It becomes the written memory of the organization. Furthermore, writing conveys emotional stability which eventually promotes the process of organizational development.
• They speed up the transference and transformation of knowledge to make ideas flow easily and take learning into action.

Internal blogs are not a fashion or a modern practice, they are a great idea. As we have seen, it generates an excellent resource for internal communication which impacts productivity and strengthens emerging leadership. To participate, to talk and to keep conversations through internal blogs, a unique communications perspective and experience is born.
However, we detect the following reactions within organizations when talking about internal blogs:

• Lack of interest for considering blog an informal medium
• Fear of no means of command and control
• Insistence on imposing blogging policies and rules

Besides, we often face a recurrent problem: many of the conversations that take place within organizations look more like a ping pong game than true collaboration. On the other hand, experience shows that it is not technology that makes the difference, but the people who use it and take profit from it.

These are the starting points where the important role of a Public Relations professional appears as fundamental to coach the entire organization to adopt this medium. The question that the organization should ask itself is: What do we want to achieve by means of internal blogging? The fluency in the informal channel encourages the redesign of relationships within the organization, generating participation spaces to obtain results and objectives.

A design of conversations, allows internal blogs to spring up dialogues, ideas, and knowledge that lie in an abstract and individual level and shift them to a concrete collective level. When in the latter, we find reflections; ideas and shared knowledge, actions and new possibilities are generated. Internal blogs become a learning network and spontaneous collaboration.

Internal blogs don’t need a rigid policy or restrictive rules. They only require a team protocol and a common mission to make understanding and simultaneous conversation easier. The challenges consist of discovering the strengths and weaknesses of this medium to coordinated actions and explore new ways of collaboration. The goal is for employees to coordinate actions, open possibilities, and generate a space for the development of new conversations.

In an economy based on knowledge, productivity results from people’s capacity to make effective conversations. Internal blogging calls for the rediscovery of productive language, the idea of collective co-creations and the development of the organization’s voice.

About the author

Matias Fernandez Dutto is a PR strategist and management consultant, specializing in social technologies. Since 2000, he has facilitated and managed marketing strategy and corporate communications programs across a range of industries for B2B and B2C clients in Latin America. Matias focuses on coaching about effective use, implementation and management change of new communications technologies in emerging business models. Matias evangelizes the application of new technologies in traditional public relations campaigns in Latin America. He authors the Relaciones Públicas weblog, which offer articles and news about how blogs and new technologies are changing the public relations practices. He is currently writing a book about effective methods of communication and public relations in the Digital Age. Matias can be reached via email at pr.matias@gmail.com

{tags: prblogweek, pr, public+relations, internal+blogs}