On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs

Abstract

Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communica-tion within enterprises. While at the minimum blogs empower em-ployees to publicly voice opinion and share expertise, collectively they improve collaboration and enable internal business intelligence. Though the power of blogs within organizations is well accepted, their properties, structure and utility has not yet been formally an-alyzed. In this paper, we study the use of blogs within a large cor-poration to reveal some of the interesting characteristics. We pro-pose new techniques to model the reach and impact of posts using the corporate hierarchy. We discuss how such a technique can feed into tools that identify the reach of blog posts, and the emergence of trends and experts within an organization. 1.