Coming Soon: CogBlog
A while back I mentioned that I was kickstarting the initiative to start a corporate blog for my company, Aptima. There are a few reasons why I haven’t posted here in a while, but one of them is that every spare moment over the last couple of weeks I have spent designing and implementing the blog for my company.
Well, today I launched the blog internally on our secure server. It was a very fast development process for a few reasons—the biggest being that I didn’t have a budget for it, so I did it on my own time. I consider it my Christmas gift to the company. 
We even had a bit of a contest to name the blog. Luckily, I was still allowed to take part. My lone submission ended up winning: CogBlog. We have a large number of Cognitive Scientists at Aptima, so it seemed to be a good fit.
So, what are some notes on the development so far?:
- Multiple Authors: We will have quite a few folks contributing to the blog, and I wanted each blogger to have an identity. One design decision I made right away that seemed to help this was adding a thumbnail photo for each blogger. Also, each author will have an archive page that will also contain a short bio.
- Excerpt vs. Full Content: On the home page I’m showing just an excerpt of each article. Why? Since we have many bloggers, there is bound to be many different topics on the front page (more so than if it was just one blogger). So, for that reason not every reader will be interested in every topic. Just posting the excerpt will allow readers to see more posts than just the most recent.
- Popular Posts: I found and installed Alex King’s excellent Popularity Contest plugin. It uses an algorithm to calculate the most popular posts based on views, comments, trackbacks, etc. Should be interesting to see how this plays out over time.
Also, (of course) the blog is done with 100% standards. I’ll be looking out for places to add Microformats, but I’m not seeing any obvious choices yet.
More to come as we inch closer to launch. We’re anticipating sending the blog live sometime in January. So, stay tuned. I’ll post more info here.
Look forward to hearing more about CogBlog. I’ve just come into a company that could greatly benefit from a corp blog but am meeting some resistance.
Thanks for commenting. I’d love to hear about the types of resistance you are getting. There are a lot of arguments out there that can be debunked with some research. I’ve done some of that research, so feel free to elaborate. Thanks!
Execs have been cool with creating blogs for our “clients” (we have more than one group) and seem to buy-in to how it will lend credibility and strengthen our reputation for customer service. My CEO, however, is hung up on the idea of an employee blog.
He recently spent a lot of bucks implementing a company-wide employee survey, and one of the biggest complaints was that employees don’t feel they are being listened to. Perfect opportunity one would think, to start an employee blog (behind the firewall)! Wrong. Instead the CEO actually put a physical message board in one of the break rooms for people to post ideas, complaints, suggestions. My contention is that his method may actually inhibit emply communication.
I think the idea of a blog scares him. Any ideas or data you have would be much appreciated.
I think you hit it right on the head at the end. It seems the #1 holdup for companies having blogs are they are afraid of what customers might say. For internal blogs, this can translate to companies being afraid of what their employees might say.
If you don’t want a blog because you are afraid of what your customers might say, then you have a much bigger problem on your hands than deciding whether or not to blog. This, again, can translate to employees. If you don’t want your employees communicating because you’re afraid of what they might say, then you have the wrong employees (or more likely, the wrong opinion of them).
CogBlog will be an external blog, but I’ve been toying with the idea of an internal blog for knowledge share. We currently have a wiki, but with wikis you specifically have to go look for something to get information. With a blog, the latest information can be pushed to you via RSS. (I understand that you can have update to the wiki pushed via RSS, but with blogs it is one cohesive idea and not updates to a page that has already been published.)
Maybe a scuccessful “pitch” is just a matter of establishing goals for what the blog will accomplish. Telling the CEO that the blog is just a method for employees to communicate, (s)he may assume that it is just water cooler talk or gossip that should never enter an archivable technology.
If you lay out an information architecture that shows the value the blog can bring, you may get better responses (pardon me if you have done this already). So, for my company’s internal blog, I may say that we’ll have categories for “Current Projects”, “Business Opportunities”, “Proposals”, “Product Development”, “General Technology” (to discuss technologies we may not have used in projects yet, but could in the future if we find the right application), and then… perhaps… “General Discussion” (but stress that this category would house topics like “Does anyone know this customer?” or “Does anyone have this book handy?” and helpful information like that.
Let me know how it goes. I’m here if you have any more questions or have any specific issues. Thanks for stopping by again.