Firing bloggers part III — avoiding unnecessary conflicts

In Part I of this series, I looked at some tragic cases in which freewheeling bloggers lost their jobs when their blogging activities created what was perceived by management as an unacceptable conflict with corporate interests.

In Part II, I discussed some considerations in dealing with employee-bloggers, including potential marketing benefits, potential PR risks, and the analogy to principles developed to assess employer responses to other types of employee off-duty (mis)conduct.

Here, in Part III, I hope to explore some options to help bloggers and their employers avoid unneccessary conflicts — and perhaps even obtain benefits from employee blogging for employer as well as employee.

Before we begin, I’d like to strongly recommend reading this in-depth Fortune magazine article, which is one of the best I’ve seen on the subject of the interaction between businesses and the blogging world:

“Why There’s No Escaping the Blog; Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they’ve become a force business can’t afford to ignore (by David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth).

Now, let’s look at some of the options a blogger may consider vis-a-vis his/her employer. I would classify the choices as follows (perhaps there are other variations):

1) Blog anonymously and don’t discuss work-related matters (safest option, but potentially unsatisfactory if employee desires to blog about area of expertise or to fully explore own life in a personal journal style blog — and work is an important element of that life);

2) Blog in your own name and don’t discuss work-related matters and/or don’t identify employer — the option chosen by veteran blogger Catherine Collingwood as she begins a new job (fairly safe, though you still might blog something the employer finds extremely inappropriate/offensive, which might somehow be connected back to the employer);

3) Blog anonymously and discuss work-related matters (less safe, as blogger’s cover could be blown, but obviously less restrictive as to desired subject matter);

4) Blog in your own name, identify employer, sometimes discuss work-related matters, but use a disclaimer, like: “Opinions expressed here are mine, and not those of my employer” (high risk of saying or depicting something employer — particularly conservative one unacquainted with blogosphere — might nonetheless find inappropriate);

5) Participate in employer-sponsored — and perhaps employer-censored — blog (very safe if properly done, and may be relatively open as to subject matter if employer knows enough about the realities of the blogosphere). For an example, see the official Google blog, in which individual employee-contributors are identified by name. Interesting that in one post on this blog “GoogleGuy” is identified as an anonymous Google engineer. He apparently posts Google-related information various places around the web, and his quotes are collected and assembled in one handy place by — who else — a non-Google blogger at GoogleGuy Says.

A notable example of a type 4 employee-blogger is Robert Scoble, of Scobleizer, who says: “Robert Scoble works at Microsoft (title: technical evangelist). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted.”

Scoble gets away with the occasional corporate heresy, like this on a search engine comparison between Google; Yahoo; and MSN: “Personally, I still like Google the best. Why? MSN and Yahoo push their results down with too much advertising. It’s funny, I should appreciate the advertising on MSN more. After all, it helps pay my salary. But the thing that Google did great was to take a customer-centric approach. Sorry MSN team, I’m still not switching.”

And Microsoft employees have absolutely tons of blogs going (link is to long list). Some contain tech info that some MS users would find useful, thus having a customer service function. Others sound more as they came from academia — open discussions of all manner of software issues.

Could some of this hurt the company? Sure. But the net benefit apparently is judged to outweigh the risk.

See this blog post discussing the Fortune article and its quotation of Bill Gates re Scoble and his ilk: “‘It’s all about openness,’ says chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft’s public blogs like Scobleizer. ‘People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn’t afraid to be self-critical.’”

Yet from the management point of view in most organizations, there tends to be a fear that a no-holds-barred tolerant attitude towards blogs is too risky. And I agree. A reasonable balance must be achieved. This is best done through a conscious corporate policy, probably developed in concert with some active employee-bloggers.

Librarians, like lawyers, are pretty big bloggers due to the information-intensive nature of their work, though both professions still lag behind computer tech fields. So it’s not surprising that credit goes to a librarian, Steven M. Cohen of Library Stuff for tipping me off to this “Sample Corporate Blogging Policy,” which I find to be a fine start:

1) Make it clear that the views expressed in the blog are yours alone and do not necessarily represent the views of your employer.

2) Respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information.

3) Ask your manager if you have any questions about what is appropriate to include in your blog.

4) Be respectful to the company, employees, customers, partners, and competitors.

5) Understand when the company asks that topics not be discussed for confidentiality or legal compliance reasons.

6) Ensure that your blogging activity does not interfere with your work commitments.

Credit for this policy actually traces back to Charlene Li’s excellent November 8, 2004 post: “Blogging Policy Examples.” A number of useful links to other blogging policies, codes of ethics for bloggers, and blog disclaimers are found in this post, including Robert Scoble’s “The Corporate Weblog Manifesto” and the Harvard Law School blog policy.

I’ve run on at some length on this subject here (and in parts I and II). If this effort helps provide a basis for better understanding and accomodation between a few talented bloggers and their employers, and prevents a few unnecessary crises or terminations over inappropriate blog postings, it will have been well worth my writing time and your reading time.

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