Blogs in Business

Boston Globe writes on the rationale: “Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You’ve mapped your workers’ brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who’s been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars — just the thing when you’re trying to sell something to an avid collector of ’64 Mustangs. The company’s hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm’s institutional memory gets an upgrade.”