I was at the Society for New Communication Research’s annual forum yesterday in Boston (congratulations to Jen McClure and her associates for a strong first-year event) and had an interesting chat with Franz Dill, who’s kind of the chief blogging evangelist at Procter & Gamble. Dill is a 27-year P&G veteran who runs an internal blog that highlights new technologies that may be of use to the business. He’s got about 1,000 subscribers to an internal newsletter and he’s encouraging other P&Gers to get on the blogging bandwagon.

About 100 of them have done so. Anyone at P&G can have an internal blog, he said. They just put up their hand and P&G gives them an account, some training and a presence on an internal portal that links to all the blogs within the company. Initial interest came mostly from the technie crowd, but word is now spreading to the business people and the internal P&G blogosphere is becoming more diverse. That’s good, because the purpose of blogging is to share information about the business.

P&G’s experiment is being played out across the corporate world, where blogs are becoming a more and more important tool in internal communications. It’s what I call the shadow blogosphere. Lots of journalists and bloggers have complained about the lack of blogging activity by big businesses. I’d guess that less than 20% of corporations outside of the tech sector have public blogs (The New PR Wiki maintains the best list I’ve seen in this area). I think there are good reasons for corporations to be skeptical of public blogging, including legal liability, compliance issues, the risk of public embarrassment and competitive sabotage. I expect big businesses to continue to creep slowly into the blogosphere.

Behind the firewall, though, there’s plenty of action. Talk to companies that sell content management systems and they’ll tell you that most of their corporate business is internal. It’s not that big businesses don’t “get” blogging. They just don’t see a compelling need to blog in public.

There are compelling reasons to blog internally, though. Dill noted that because blogs are easy to archive and search, they create a database of corporate knowledge over time. This is a resource for new employees, in particular, since they can now tap into historical information that helps them come up to speed quickly on the company. Blogs are easier to maintain than e-mail lists and they’re a great way to disseminate timely information. The idea of an internal corporate portal is great. Employees should have one place they can come to discover what information is available around the company. These portals are fulfilling the promise of intranets.

P&G is now experimenting with blogs in its supply chain. These are private journals intended for use by its suppliers and distributors to keep current with news that relates to them. That’s another great application of this technology.

It’s hard to tap into the conversations that are going on in the shadow blogosphere because companies don’t see a need to talk publicly about it. But I’m convinced that this is where the action is in corporate blogging right now and may be where it will stay for the next couple of years.