Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity. Really????

Susan Adams of Forbes, recently published an article titled, Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity . She essentially talks about some study that showed that productivity increased when employees were blogging about personal stuff on their corporate blogs. The article concludes with a rather hasty conclusion that personal blogging is good for productivity.

Good read, but I feel like article makes a very blanket statement with insufficient data. Data from one study with the name of the company and the type of data collected withheld makes me question the the conclusion reached. These types of studies are very dependent on type of industry studied. For example, in travel industry, company wide sharing of personal photos and stories from vacation trips is not only allowed but also encouraged. This is their business. It makes sense for them to share this stuff widely inside their organization and use it to improve their business. So if the study queried a travel industry, for example, than the conclusion would make sense.

I personally don't think sharing personal experiences on a corporate blog is such a good idea. Occasionally it may be fine. For example, if you are using a personal story to tie it to something work related. But that connection has to exist. Pure personal stories would cause the blog subscribers to unsubscribe overtime. Our CIO maintains a internal IT related corporate blog, and I subscribe to the blog. But if he starts talking about this personal life on that corporate blog, without making it relevant to work, I will unsubscribe quickly.

Just my opinion. I would like to hear what others thinks of this.