Not What I Expected...

Blogging, and where you work...

Jeremy Zawodny and Buzz Andersen write about the blogger and corporate culture. I touched on this earlier in the "Sally Rand" piece. It appears that Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this, at least regarding Scoble and Poccaro--they have a very good idea what they can and can't post because it's been communicated to them.

I really, really do not want to see this become a flash or freak-out point for corporations. This has already been touched upon in the harvard Business Review-- Halley Suitt, of Halley's Comment, wrote a blogging scenario as that month's case study.

At first, I thought--you know, this should have already been taken care of back in 1995, when corporations first started to pay attention to that their employees had their own web sites. I remember situations where an employee either said some pretty negative stuff about their company, or informed the world about a product that wasn't yet on the market

But wait a minute....

This should have been taken care of at a lot of corporations back in the 1980's, when they discovered that their employees were using email and posting to Usenet! Anything before that is a pretty small set of people on the net, who worked for companies (or universities--they have stuff they'd rather not have passed along) on the net. And since most of them had email addresses that referred to their place of work or study, it was pretty easy to track down.

So, this shouldn't be a big surprise to the boys in the carpeted wing, should it?

I guess it must be, because right now, most bloggers who write about their own milieu are either aligning with corporate culture (want to prove that's an implied corporate standard in a wrongful dismissal court case?), or just not mentioning where they work.

This is just not going to work in the long run--we're going to have someone who's posting stuff that their company really doesn't want to be shared with a couple million of their closest friends. And what I'm worried about is that some will take the easy way out--tell their employees that they can't identify where they work, or make them sign something that says they can't discuss anything that has to do with the technology that the company produces. Yes, they'll get a lot of control, but they'll lose a lot of goodwill on all sides.

This is the time for corporate and employee bloggers to get together to talk about what's appropriate and what's not, and put together a reasonable set of guidelines.

Unless, of course, they want a repeat of "ohmygawd, they have web pages!" from 1995, and "ohmygawd, they're posting to Compuserve" from 1988, and "ohmygawd, they're posting to Usenet!" from 1982...

...and so on

Posted by lsefton at September 23, 2003 12:45 PM