Do enterprises of Latvia fear of internal blogs?

As a new social media blogs have become more and more popular in public relations. It is known as corporate blogging (by its definition - publishing blogs by or with the support of an organization to reach that organization's goals). Authors Ojala and Raghavan mention three types of this corporate blogging: employees’ or internal, leaders’ or management, marketing or communication blogs. In my opinion not only the latter but all of them are devoted to public relations. I would like to discuss the development of the first ones – internal blogs that mostly are made by employees of the organization on the intranet.

During one of my research projects I surveyed Public Relations departments of some largest companies in Latvia and the results were quite sad. Although the amount of internet users in Latvia is continuously growing we’re still afraid of new possibilities that this new medium offers.

Zane Siksnāne, project manager in internal communication of Lattelecom – the leading provider of electronic communications services in Latvia – was really positive on internal blogging but still for now all new technologies are in a planning phase. Positively that CEO of Lattelecom Nils Melngailis is one of the bloggers in “Diena” project ldiena.lv.

Zane Eniņa, Marketing and PR manager in Ltd. RIMI Latvia – one of the leading retailers in food and fast movement goods in Baltic States – also is positively minded on blogging but considers them unnecessary and odd for now. She mentioned two main reasons why. Firstly enterprise needs to ask itself – is there a person in the company that has something to say on a regular basis? Now they have intranet, e-mail system and homepage with all of the information. The second reason would be language barrier - RIMI Latvia is one of the RIMI Baltics companies and lots of communication goes in English.

Very similar opinion (except the language part) has Antra Gaile – project manager of newspaper Diena, Kristaps Otersons, PR department manager of Bank of Latvia and internal communication project manager of Hansabanka (one of the leading commercial banks in Latvia, ) Līva Dzirniece. The organizations are satisfied with intranet, discussion board, e-mail lists, electronic newspaper inside the company. For now there is no need to blog inside the company. But what regards external blogging – Diena completely support that and also has made two portals generally devoted to interaction by blogs – ldiena.lv and vdiena.lv. The same with Hansabanka who's managers writes their own official blogs. On contrary Bank of Latvia considers external blogging as a inadmissible practice. Kristaps Otersons mentioned belief that Bank operates in a very sensitive sphere and all facts must be truthful and approved. Blogs are considered as too subjective.

Of course I cannot say that this is the opinion of all enterprises in Latvia but the main tendency is that we can’t accept this new form of communication. Perhaps it is too risky to give the floor to the employees…