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Talking with my coworkers about the year-end review yesterday at the office, I mentioned that I've put "consider using weblogs as a communication tool, both internally and externally" as a suggestion for improving communications. And Jonathan and Dan went "Huh?"

As if they know what I'm looking for, both Simon Brown and Cathy Sierra blogged on related issues in recent days:

Simon Brown: ... a few suggestions really shout out to me as being spot on.

• Instead of print ads, get some training articles out there: This is something that I'm a big fan of and it's part of our culture at Evolution. It's down to thought-leadership, although rather than *tell* somebody we're good, we *show* them. ;-)
• Instead of hiring a PR agent, get blogs for employees and/or users: This is a great idea and, provided you have satisfied and enthusiastic employees/users, you're on to a winner here since promotion will come from within. If you don't, at least you'll realise that you need to fix some stuff!
• Instead of spreading compelling yet fake stories, tell the real story and make sure it's good: Kind of ties back nicely to the previous point, but if you don't have a good story internally, how do you expect to promote that externally?

Cathy Sierra: I've worked for companies that spent their entire ad and marketing budget on making their existing users deliriously happy. Let's say your marketing and/or ad budget doesn't have the same legs it used to, or that you've just decided to make a change. Or maybe you don't even have a marketing budget. Is there something you can do that might be more creative and, in many cases today, at least--if not more--effective?

These are off the top of my head and my usual disclaimers apply (doesn't work for everything, etc.), and I hope others will add better ideas.

Cathy's list is rather long to be quoted here, but it's worth a read. Go ahead and read the whole thing.

It is interesting to note that OCI has been putting out training articles for years in the form of our Java News Brief (JNB) and CORBA Articles series.

It's hard work. But it can be done.