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Using blogs to keep transferees informed

By Ronald Huiskamp

According to BlogPulse™ (a service by Intelliseek® that monitors Web log statistics) there are an estimated 22 million blogs identified, with a whopping 61,178 new blogs added on a recent day.  Clearly, the act of blogging is no longer limited to teenagers and political pundits.

Corporations were not necessarily the early adopters of this new technology.  The point of this article is provide some background information about this easy to use tool and offer suggestions for how blogs can be used by HR professionals that manage international transferees.

What about blogs
There are plenty of people who live comfortably outside the “blogosphere” so a little bit of information about blogs may be in order.  In its basic form a blog is an online journal. New entries, “posts”, are recorded by date and displayed in reverse chronological order.  

A blog is also “just” another Web site: it has its own URL, typically consists of multiple pages and includes navigation buttons. There is one notable difference however.  A blog, can be maintained without the headaches of knowing how to write HTML code or needing a programmer to make changes to its content. 

Herein lies the main reason for the success of blogging; everybody can do it.

Not short on features
Even though blogs are easy to setup and maintain, blog services come with plenty of built-in features and infrastructure.  Here are some examples:

Post editor
All blog services come with user-friendly text editing tools, to write and publish a post.  After launching such an editor, one can enter text, dress it up a bit with some basic formatting, maybe add a picture and some links (to e.g. another Web site or a document) and hit the “save” button to instantly publish the post on the blog.

Categories
To organize posts by topic, information categories can be defined within a blog.  Each entry is assigned to at least one category.

Archives
Archives are generated automatically within a blog. As each post gets a date and time stamp all content is immediately sorted by date. Browsing the archive can be done by selecting a previous month or clicking on a specific date on a calendar.

Comments
An important part of the “culture” of blogs is its interactive environment. Readers are encouraged to comment on posts. Depending on the freedom given by the blogger, such comments will be directly posted on the blog or only after the blogger has approved them.

Syndication
Syndicating a Web site means making it available to other sites to use. With blogs this is done every time the content has changed. Through publishing standards such as RSS, users are notified when a new post has been added to a blog.

Back to the transferee
Blog services offer an inexpensive and very effective alternative to content management systems typically used to maintain sites. The HR department can dedicate a blog to matters relating to relocation. Think of categories like: relocation policy, benefits, immigration, taxation, etc. By running it on a company’s secure Intranet (away from public access) HR professionals have a centralized tool to keep their transferees informed.

About the author: Ronald Huiskamp is the Editor in Chief for ReloBlogger (www.reloblogger.com) and the Director of Marketing of Full Circle International Relocations, Inc.