Will "Blogs" Become Obsolete?

February 9, 2007 Dennis D. McDonald

I'm advising a corporate client who is establishing an internal blog. The client conducts research via surveys, focus group interviews, and other means. The client currently makes the research findings available to the parent organization's staff members through a variety of presentations, reports, emails and ad-hoc analyses.

The new blog is being designed to support the work of the market research group and to demonstrate the various ways the parent organization can employ social media and social networking tools. Initially the focus of the blog will be on internal users. Eventually the new blog’s reach could extend beyond the organization's staff members. Currently anticipated applications include:

Use of the blog as a basic tool for making the market research group's research findings more accessible to the parent organization's management and staff.
Engage staff members in dialog about the research and its application to the organization's mission.
Help respond to frequently received requests such as, “Do you keep a list or file folder of all the research recently conducted?"
Help remind people to use and action the research.

Some of the staff members of the parent organization are familiar with blogging and blogging related tools and services; many are not. This will be the first time many of them are exposed to these tools within the context of their own organization.

My question to readers of All Kind Food is, should this effort be referred to as a "blog?" Or is there some other term we should be using?

The blog initially will support posts, commenting, file access, feeds -- the usual suspects. What we take for granted today as standard "blog" features may soon become standard features of software applications that support a variety of business processes (e.g., ERP's, customer relationship management, sales support, field service, equipment maintenance, network support, corporate publishing, etc.). Some company-internal blogs could disappear as functions we now take for granted migrate from blogs to other business applications.

If that's the case, perhaps my client should start now to get away from referring to this initial effort as a "blog."

What do you think? Please leave a comment below or send me an email at ddmcd@yahoo.com. Thank you!