Whilst corporates are using so-called social media tools - such as blogs, vlogs and micro tools such as Twitter - more than ever, many companies are stopping short of considering such technologies as ‘official’ corporate communication channels - such as email.

Reasons for this appear to be twofold: cultural and technological.

In general, senior business managers view blogs and blogging as ‘consumer’ forms of communication and added to that, RSS isn’t too easy to integrate into corporate desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook. Often companies lock down corporate PCs to ensure that feed aggregator services are blocked.

However, as businesses slowly migrate to Microsoft’s new Office 2007 product (which does allow integration with RSS) could we start to see a shift to blogs and RSS feeds being used alongside email? And if so, will this be good news for executives suffering from the perennial problem of email overload? Leave your comments below.