Using blogs as a means to communicate within your company

Blogs can be an excellent tool for businesses that strive towards internal transparency, where open communication between staff can be integral to the longterm success of the business. Employees who are in the loop (and are actually contributing to it,) have a much higher personal stake in your business than employees who are not.

Keeping internal communications internal is of concern to most businesses as well.

Here is how you can address this with an internal company blog using Blogspot and a company email group (I use Google's mailing lists to do this myself):

After you have setup your blog and are logged into your account:

1. Go to the Settings tab
2. Select Permissions
3. Under Blog Authors, add the email addresses of everyone you would like to be able to write to the Blog.
4. Under Blog Readers, select 'Only blog Authors'

This is when you will need to go to your external email administration system as the mail administrator and add a 'Mailing List'.


5. Add the blog author's email addresses to the list. Your mailing list could be called something like: internalblog@yourwebsiteaddress.com.
6. In your Blogger Settings tab, select Email
7. Enter your mailing list address in the BlogSend Address field.

Congratulations. Now you have a blog that:

• Is 'Private', so that only your invited subscribers can view it and post to it
• Is automatically emailed to everyone in the mailing list; eg, all your staff

You have just enabled collaborative communication with your staff, without exposing internal issues to the rest of the world. Congratulations on building your business up from the inside!