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Collaborative Blogs

Unlike blogs designed for external communications, Socialtext collaborative blogs are designed to facilitate dynamic conversations among colleagues. They advance shared knowledge on important topics, and create corporate memory of this valuable knowledge.

Most companies have no corporate memory for employees to tap on the most business-critical topics, such as customer feedback, new feature requests and ideas, and best practices. Most people also have no good way to disseminate updates to an existing topic. Instead, each update is distributed separately, with no continuity, as if it were a separate topic.

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Project teams have a similar challenge. Without Socialtext, team members have to rely on email to stay up-to-date, which is a very inefficient and time-consuming way for teams to communicate. To track project status, a central person typically collects status reports at arbitrary intervals, rather than when status actually changes, saves them into a document – a static, isolated snapshot – and shares the document in e-mail with little surrounding context.

Create a hub of information, ideas and expertise on important topics

With Socialtext blogs, teams both large and small can stay informed and engaged on important topics. Socialtext blogs give colleagues a way to share and log important findings and updates when they occur – to every employee, to a defined team working on a specific deliverable, or to a group of like individuals who want to focus on best practices for their function.

Socialtext blogs are purpose-built for internal collaboration. Every authorized user can contribute to the conversation and build on the ideas of other colleagues. Everyone can freely contribute a new post or add in-line comments. And with a click you can see the full history of all revisions. This revision history is a unique capability that makes the Socialtext blog collaborative, unlike other blog offerings that impose prohibitive structure on group authorship.

Construct persistent corporate memory of critical subjects

Since each blog is persistent, taggable, searchable, linkable, and findable, it not only provides a forum for ideas and sharing but it also serves as persistent corporate memory of the dialog into the future. Often a blog conversation gels a discussion into a state where it is then baked into a more formal deliverable, recorded on a wiki page, turning conversations into content.

Transparent leadership

Leaders need to transmit strategy, culture, and learnings, broadly, authentically, and continuously. Secure internal blogs can dramatically expand the scale and impact of your leaders' communications – in a more engaging and interactive fashion than simple ‘corporate newsletter’ publishing.

Bridge across silos

Integrated into the collaboration platform, blogs are tagged and discovered, just like other Socialtext workspace pages. Blog content is included in search results, so blogs are discovered by colleagues who do a content or tag search. Since blog tags are included in tag clouds, blogs are also discovered by colleagues as they browse. Blogs are also discovered when colleagues click on Blog on the top of any workspace page and see a full list of blogs. In addition, an update to a blog triggers notifications to those who subscribe to the workspace, the person or the page, which is another source of discovery. With these mechanisms in place, a blog conversation will often attract interested others who jump in and add new perspectives to the dialog.

Start conversations with ease

Creating a blog is as easy as adding a special tag to a wiki page. Once the blog is created, any authorized user can add to it by simply clicking New Post. Or, simply tag any wiki page with a blog name and the page will be appended as a new post to a blog. You can add a blog posting by email, and you can even read blog posts offline, add to them, and synchronize your changes when you are back online.

There are times when you may have a topic that is relevant to multiple blogs. A topic may, for example, be pertinent to your project team blog, a product input blog, and a customer feedback blog. Socialtext blogs allow you to cross-post to multiple blogs at one time. You simply write the content to a single wiki page and tag the page with each blog’s name. The page will automatically get appended as a new posting to all the blogs you named. If in your collaboration travels you discover an existing workspace page that would add value to a blog conversation, you can just tag it with the blog name and the content will appear as a new blog post for everyone to see. In this way you easily leverage information that has already been contributed.

Every blog automatically generates an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. The Socialtext collaboration platform, in fact, automatically generates an RSS feed for every page, tag, search query, watchlist and workspace, providing the most robust RSS/Atom syndication support available in any collaborative product today. Using the RSS feed, you can monitor the blog conversations from a widget on your Socialtext Dashboard.

Author a journal that shares, teaches, and builds trust

You can also use a Socialtext blog as an individual journal; a way of sharing important experiences, musings, and lessons with colleagues. This open sharing allows people to get to know each other better and builds trust.

“Twitter” for the Enterprise

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This recorded webinar will help you discover how "Twitter-like" microblogging tools used privately, behind the firewall, can unlock new and powerful ways to work. Learn how microblogging is being used by companies to enable their people to be more aware, get valuable answers quickly, and work cohesively.

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