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A Look at the Tools
Thankfully for blogging and for your company, using and reading blogs needn't be a new or disorienting experience.
Tools such as NewsGator, for example, allow you to receive updates to blogs you read as email-like messages (Microsoft Outlook required). This familiarity will help new users to consume and take advantage of blogs. Other tools for other software packages allow similar integration.
In addition, most blogging tools allow you to email your posts to the software. By making use of something users understand (like email) to produce and consume blogs, the adoption and learning curves are completely the opposite of what they normally are. Yes, the reading of blogs still needs to be an individual decision. But if the most important things that happen in a team or company are being communicated through a blog, few smart employees will pass up the opportunity to make their voice heard.
Leveraging email as a notification tool allows the blog to become the discussion, collaboration, and knowledge management location for a myriad of subjects. It also allows for some strong advantages in areas such as document management.
One of the biggest pluses of blogs for any company is the cost. Although there are expensive enterprise blogging tools, the reality is that most of them offer few advantages over other platforms that can cost between $25–$500. In addition, extra software such as NewsGator can be purchased at a massively discounted site-license price, according to NewsGator's Director of Sales, Mike Lombardo.