MIT's Technology Review ran a great article about the blogging culture inside Sun Microsystems. A lot can be learned from this most visible of corporate experiments. But are most companies ready to follow Sun's lead?
Companies with top-down management cultures and controls on the flow of information probably aren’t ready for the era of employee blogging. Nor is their reluctance likely to hurt them, if they have a locked-in base of customers; don’t expect to see employees at Lockheed-Martin blogging about their progress on the latest stealth technology, for example. But consumer-oriented companies that abjure the blogosphere are missing out on opportunities to generate buzz, monitor customer concerns, and—perhaps most importantly—show their human side. As [COO Jonathan] Schwartz puts it, "Any company that feels threatened by blogs probably feels threatened by the Internet."
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