The Dangers of Corporate Blogs
For a company, the decision to encourage or not employees to start individual blogs and to start or not a corporate blog can have some positive and some negative consequences. On this post, I will focus on some of the risks. I will cover some of the upside in another one later.
First, I see three main options (the last two are not mutually exclusive) that companies have chosen so far as far as their blog strategy is concerned.
Option 1: Do nothing.
It seems to still be the case for the vast majorities of companies out there. Most companies simply don't have a corporate blog and/or a policy specific to employees' personal blogs. Even in the absence of a specific blog policy, and as proven by a series of highly visible cases recently, employees should be careful not to violate any other corporate rules. Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and Google employee Mark Jen both got fired over content they published on their personal blogs. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding offensive jokes for example, few of the policies directly cover blogs, particularly those written outside of work.
Option 2: Formalize the guidelines covering personal blog publishing.
This could actually inspire some blog vocations and trigger the creation of employee blogs. As long as the employees don't reveal corporate secrets or impact the company brand in negative ways, it could actually help create interest in the company and drive traffic to the corporate site. The key in this case is to start a dialogue between employers and employees about what to say and not to say. Sun's Policy is an interesting example [ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy].
Option 3: Launch an "official corporate blog" or a "official directory of employee blogs".
Several technology companies such as Google [http://www.google.com/googleblog/],
Ask Jeeves [http://blog.ask.com/] or Macromedia [http://www.markme.com/mxna/index.cfm] have launched official corporate blogs with contribution from various employees. Microsoft has a slightly different strategy with the notion of the "Microsoft Community Blogs" focused on various topics [http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/PortalHome.mspx] but the spirit is similar.
But, these strategies have some risks associated with them.
The first one - doing nothing - is probably the most risky:
First, I see three main options (the last two are not mutually exclusive) that companies have chosen so far as far as their blog strategy is concerned.
Option 1: Do nothing.
It seems to still be the case for the vast majorities of companies out there. Most companies simply don't have a corporate blog and/or a policy specific to employees' personal blogs. Even in the absence of a specific blog policy, and as proven by a series of highly visible cases recently, employees should be careful not to violate any other corporate rules. Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and Google employee Mark Jen both got fired over content they published on their personal blogs. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding offensive jokes for example, few of the policies directly cover blogs, particularly those written outside of work.
Option 2: Formalize the guidelines covering personal blog publishing.
This could actually inspire some blog vocations and trigger the creation of employee blogs. As long as the employees don't reveal corporate secrets or impact the company brand in negative ways, it could actually help create interest in the company and drive traffic to the corporate site. The key in this case is to start a dialogue between employers and employees about what to say and not to say. Sun's Policy is an interesting example [ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy].
Option 3: Launch an "official corporate blog" or a "official directory of employee blogs".
Several technology companies such as Google [http://www.google.com/googleblog/],
Ask Jeeves [http://blog.ask.com/] or Macromedia [http://www.markme.com/mxna/index.cfm] have launched official corporate blogs with contribution from various employees. Microsoft has a slightly different strategy with the notion of the "Microsoft Community Blogs" focused on various topics [http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/PortalHome.mspx] but the spirit is similar.
But, these strategies have some risks associated with them.
The first one - doing nothing - is probably the most risky:
- Competitors can take the lead in establishing a vibrant presence in the blog community and outflank you.
- Visitors to your site might start looking for alternative ways of learning about you, either through blogs or RSS feeds and be dissapointed to not find those. I can hear the "Are their marketing people sleeping or what?" comments.
- Your name will for sure be mentionned in people's blog without any monitoring and you may miss important information or trend by simply not focusing enough attention on it.
- Other people or company can register blog related URLs with your name in it (such as http://www.thecompanyblog.com/ or http://www.companyblog.com/). You should register those right now if you haven't already to avoid having others do it and start "unofficial blogs". It is unclear to me if The Apple Blog [http://www.theappleblog.com/] is officially approved by Apple or if it is just a way for someone to generate advertising dollars.
The second option - formalize guidelines - could also have some interesting negative side effects:
- By "awakening" some vocations, the company could experience a negative impact on productivity. What can really prevent employees from blogging at work? Some URL filtering software can find a new life!
- On another extreme, formal guidelines - as any rules - can be too restrictive and discourage personal initiative. They should be crafted with care and should always reflect the main objective you have. They could also invite gaming, creating an incentive for people to find ways around them or to discover topics that are not covered by them.
- Last, guidelines are somewhat meaningless unless you enforce them. So, you have to ask yourself how much resources you are really ready to invest in monitoring how repected they are and what you are ready to enforce those.
The last option - the most proactive one - is probably the safest route, yet, I can see some dangers too:
- The main one is under-delivering. Starting a blog is one thing, having a good one is another. Some people or companies should never get started if they don' t intent to invest enough time and resources to do it well. Only one third of all blogs are actually alive and active. Make sure your corporate one isn't one of them.
- Also make sure you don't "over invest". After all, only 38% of US adults know what they are. They will only help you at the margin of your business. Sure, an potentially important margin, but still, only a margin.
posted by Francois Lavaste at 7:00 AM
1 Comments:
Another thing to remember when blogging is to try to ensure that you check your Blogs for typos, grammar and spelling mistakes. One recommendation is to post to the Blog from e-mail that spell checks everything, another is to write the Blog in a Word processor, then spell check it before cutting and pasting to the Blog. However nothing beats having your Blog read by a third party prior to posting just to check it reads as well to others as it does to the Author.
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