The Effect of Blogging in Your Company
January 27th, 2006
The effect of blogging here at UIE is simple: we’re having more and better conversations with our customers. Case in point: Christine’s recent post about snap decisions started both and online and offline conversation about how users make judgments on the applications they’re dealing with. This conversation can only be a good thing for designers and usability experts, as it gets everyone thinking about the right problem: how to delight users with the software we make.
Though we’ve only been at it since July, we feel that blogging has been a very positive experience. So I want to put it out there and see if you have had similar experiences or not. Are you blogging, or thinking about it? If so, do you think that it has been worth it? What has happened as a result?
If you have recently added blogging to your repertoire, we would love to hear about it!
January 27th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
We started a blog on our site a few months ago and the effect on our business has been tremendous. Primarily, there is a feeling of ongoing communication with our clients (and potential clients) that is incredibly energizing. Plus, the “pressure to blog” with some degree of regularity keeps us watching industry developments and thinking critically about what we, our colleagues, and clients are up to. If the steady increase in requests for our feeds is any indication, we must be doing something right. We were hopeful that the blog would attract a bit of attention to our company (which it has), but we were pleasantly surprised at the effect blogging has had on our internal feeling about what we do.
So, yes, a positive experience
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:18 pm
My colleague Jesper Rønn-Jensen and I decided last year to start a blog on usability and web standards. This was done to raise awareness on these topics internally in our company.
Instead of only publishing on our intranet, we deiced to make the blog public. Today this have had an overwhelming positive effect with comments and input from – among others – Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool – comments and input we wouldn’t have gotten if we had a “Capgemini-eyes-only” blog.
I would be very surprised if it has had a positive economic impact on our company that the blog is public. On the other hand this was never the intent in the first place. The intent was merely to raise internal usability and web standards awareness – If we could draw attention to our work in Capgemini from people outside this would just be a bonus.
February 3rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Blogging may not show instant ROI, but a good blog will generate links to it, and also be a source of frequent content revision, which are huge for boosting your search engine placement. Couple this with the personal touch it adds to your company, and I don’t see how you could go wrong. (Unless you’re divulging secrets or posting offensive topics)