Like most companies in London, the events in our city over the past few weeks have forced us to implement our emergency response procedures.

This involves communicating police advice to staff about the situation in the city, office, and on public transport, as well as any contingency plans we need to put in place (e.g. hotel rooms, private transport).

To date we have relied primarily on email but - even though many of our staff have Blackberries - this alone is not sufficient. So we recently added SMS alerting to mobile phones, and now we have created a blog for all our security updates.

Accessible outside the firewall, but securely, it allows staff to check in whenever there is a security alert to see what the current state of play is. Because it's a blog, it also has an RSS feed that staff can subscribe to (assuming their reader supports authentication). Finally, it's incredibly easy for our emergency response team (including members of our excellent crisis communications group) to post updates to it.

It uses the same technology as our blogging community, so it took literally 10 mins to get this up and running (the most time-consuming bit was changing the authentication settings on the server!).

I thought it would be worth sharing here as an example of a niche blog.

Tags: blog technology weblog london explosions business continuity