What are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing internal versus external employee blogs in a corporate setting? Are there certain industries where one of these strategies makes more sense?

Some of the benefits that external blogs can bring to a firm are the following:
• Blogs represent the lowest cost and effective communications channel with costumers.
• If companies are properly able to leverage benefits of this technology, they can create communities of products ambassadors that will improve sales and firm’s recognition.
• Blogs can show honesty and transparency within a firm to people outside the organization.
• They can help firms to get more knowledge from their external environment.
• They can also improve external communication and feedback with consumers, firm’s marketing and branding activities, and search engine position.

Internal blogging also offer the following benefits:
• They represent very strong communication and information sharing tools within the organization since any employee can participate at any time.
• Blogs can be used at every level of the organization; they can improve participation, collaboration, and learning. They also make easy to run projects with heterogeneous teams.
• They become the written memory of the organization, and speed up the transference of knowledge to make ideas flow easily.

Internal blogging is very useful in almost any industry because of the multiple benefits. External blogging also makes sense in most industries but might be very difficult to implement in some highly regulated and supervised industries such as investment banking, health care and pharmaceutics. Although many firms in these industries have already implemented some initiatives of social technologies, they usually require too much effort, time, and energy. It is true because regulatory entities are constantly watching companies within these industries, and posting content to blogs require many control mechanisms and corporate policies within firms to ensure compliance with regulations and avoid legal implications. In these regulated industries, firms should outweigh the benefits of using blogs against its costs before making a decision to implement this technology.