I started blogging back in 2007 and kept writing about innovation management for four years. My blog, Consultaglobal, registered 500,000 views. That figure captures not just direct visits, but also the positive impact of cross-syndication across social media platforms. At that point, I needed to free up time to experiment with other things. So, I retired Consultaglobal and shifted my focus to exploring corporate blogging instead.

Cloud Nouveau’s content can be accessed by employees only and is supported by Jive’s social platform for businesses. In just two years, it will soon register 10,000 views. That also appears to be a remarkable number when accounting for the fact that I’m writing about cloud computing projects that are of interest to just a handful of teams in the company. Innovarista.org is my new public blog and my plan is to move forward by keeping up with both worlds.

My learning is that there are different strategies and tools that apply to external and internal communications. There also is a need for considering whether access to content consumption is set as widely open or restricted in either domain. This basic table is just a start point to enable this discussion, a visual aid that helps me present that construct.

While everyone in given company could think of leveraging common tools across these quadrants, interestingly enough, many of the teams I have talked to over the years have deployed different collaboration and social media platforms.

These decisions are often based on what’s available at a given point of time, coupled with assessments on solutions that optimize for a given set of project objectives. Once having reached critical mass, it then becomes fairly complex to forklift all the content from one system to another without experiencing havoc.

There is an equilibrium point at which multiple platforms can co-exist in everyone’s best interest. Beyond that point, churn increases, diminishing returns kick in and, therefore, the need for thinking of synergies and consolidation.