Team Blogging at Work
This is the first of a three-part series on Web 2.0 at Work.
As Tim figured out, I work in a university admissions office with Bren. Being in the sales business there are two general types of staff: those that sell (recruit) and travel, and those that support (file coordinator, visit/event staff) the sales team.
The major traveling season for our admissions counselors is in the Fall, generally mid-September through November. They will do other short trips during the Spring, but nothing like the constant travel of the Fall. One thing we’ve always had trouble with is making everyone feel connected during these times. We’ve relied on email and phone calls in the past, but that tended to be disjointed and not consistent.
This year we decided to take a different path. I knew that our IT department was setting up some Wordpress blogs for other internal uses, so I had them set one up for us. I created a couple of posts of a HOWTO nature to help them understand the basics of authoring a post in Wordpress, but then we let them go at it with the knowledge that this was going to be our keep-in-touch place.
This was major success for us. We heard about the northern lights in Alaska, and how B&B’s ask you if you want to be woken up to see them. Even got some photos from that one. We heard stories about some of the more “colorful” parents that were met. We had a contest going to see who found the cheapest gas. One counselor liked his rental car so much he blogged about it 
It wasn’t all on the traveling side, however. We started posting the meeting minutes from our bi-weekly staff meetings. Photos to document that we actually celebrated Bosses Day. Props given to staff for stepping up when there was a major need in the office. Even news and photos of the twins just born to a recently-departed co-worker.
We still post things out there even though travel season is over, we just don’t do it with the same frequency.
One thing that was a bit of an unspoken ground rule was that the blog needed to be fairly work related. This was not a space for people to randomly talk about whatever they wanted. Before you embark on your own “office blog” make sure you have your ground rules laid out. A work blog is not a place to talk about your partying from the weekend.
Mar 1st 2007
Just a little detective work on my part I guess. I still think your blog is really cool. Nice idea on the office blog - did you have difficulty getting buy-in from everyone?
Mar 1st 2007
@tim
I don’t think it was too hard to get buy-in from a majority of the staff. I have to make it clear that this is a young team, with most of the team in their 20s still. It was probably easier to get the buy-in because of this. Beyond RSS, I installed two email subscription plugins — one for posts, one for comments — for those that think a feed is something you do in the kitchen.
As we rolled it out, not everyone was into it at first. Those of us that were would talk in the office about the posts, which piqued the interest of others who hadn’t gotten into it yet. They didn’t want to be left out of the conversation so they started checking it regularly. At least one person said they forgot to go look, and ended up setting that as her homepage so she’d always see it.
If I were on a team of developers, sysadmins, and/or support staff the blog would have to be toned differently. I could see that being an office Slashdot-like site, where people posted interesting tech articles, new product updates, triumph over a buggy section of code, and “we’re getting a lot of these types of support calls” type things. Stuff that’s all work related, but not necessarily in the nitty-gritty details of the job.
How are you thinking of using a work team blog?