Sound Policy show on tape; some more (deep?) thoughts on blogs, bloggers, and businesses
A few days ago, I mentioned that I would be participating in recording a Sound Policy show hosted by Denise Howell on the interrelationship between businesses, weblogs, and employees, which is kind of a favorite topic of mine, for fairly obvious reasons.
Well, yesterday we recorded our discussion. It was fun and interesting, and I will let you know as soon as it is posted so you can listen to it if you like.
In preparation for the discussion, Denise sent me three questions. I kind of over-prepared, and the discussion freewheeled a bit — as it should have — so I didn’t make all my prepared points.
So here are the questions, and my prepared answers, for those of you with an interest in hearing more of my evolving views on the hot topic of the relationships between businesses, blogs, and employee-bloggers.
Q. George, you said you had some “macro-thoughts” on this topic. What are they?
A. Denise, in a few years this will seem overblown. Blogging will be so mainstream that employee-blogging will have settled into three noncontroversial classes:
1) Purely personal blog. Employer never identified, even hinted at. Possibly anonymous blogger.
Smart bloggers will nevertheless avoid potentially dangerous references to workplace specifics or personalities. Since work is such a major part of life, personal blogs will inevitably touch on it, but smart bloggers will be much more conscious not to offend, even if writing anonymously.
Even these blogs may experience some additional chilling effect from the highly publicized rash of firings. If you make your personal life an open book, your employer may find out. Do you want them to know about your sex life or drinking adventures? Didn’t think so.
2) Individual professional’s blog. For marketing, the blog’s connection to a business may be made more conspicuous as the business realizes its value, the blogger becomes owner of his or her own business, or the blog becomes a marketing vehicle for one or more sponsoring businesses other than the blogger’s employer.
These blogs will still contain disclaimers of speaking for the business and will avoid dangerous discussions of workplace specifics or personalities. They will maintain a high degree of professional consciousness of the confidentiality interests of the business and/or its clients.
The disclaimer may also emphasize that the business exercises no prior restraint or censorship, thus maintaining the blog’s credibility and independence.
The blog may include some personal content. There will continue to be debate over how much of such content is useful to establish a blogging personality and keep the interest of an audience versus when it may become detrimental by trivializing the professional nature of the blog (Dennis Kennedy wrote about this issue in connection with mentioning in his blog that he is a NASCAR fan).
3) Corporate blog. No disclaimer, as it does speak for the business — except the lawyers, who will still feel compelled to insist their blog does not constitute legal advice nor create a lawyer client relationship, etc — because of ethical rules and fear of being sued by their fellow lawyers. Some kind of formal editing and prepublication review mechanism will likely be in place.
I think the second type — the individual professional’s blog — will prevail in popularity among daily business and professional readers.
The third type — the corporate blog — will find increasing use to communicate useful customer service or sales information and for internal corporate communications. These will not be blogs as we know them today, but blogs as the great communications technology they are, being put to creative uses by business.
Q. Can you talk a bit about some hosting/branding implications, and the gray areas about whose blog and whose message it is? Consider a progressive spectrum of examples: unaffiliated with company, loosely affiliated or highlighting the connection between blogger and company, and clearly and directly affiliated as official company blog.
A. There’s an interesting tension between companies preoccupied with putting distance between themselves and employee blogs and those that wish to develop “corporate” blogs.
For example, the latter would clearly want to put the company logo on the blog and use the blog to attract web traffic or reinforce the company’s brand identity and expertise with its existing client base. An expressly corporate site would require organizational control over content.
But too much corporate appearance may diminish blogger credibility. Blog readers don’t want to be reading press releases and marketing hype.
Denise, since I first had the macro thought about three classifications of blogs, your return e-mail promptly caused me to revise my simple pigeonholing.
I now think a four-dimensional classification, with each blog falling somewhere along a continuum on each classification, is more appropriate.
The first dimension is the one most clearly implicated by your question, but I think the others are worth thinking about as well:
1) Identity: Ranging from purely personal, to loosely affiliated with a business (such as prominent identification of blogger as employee of business, coupled with link to business site). The far extreme would be purely corporate, with the blog essentially being the corporate web site, or a page of it.
2) Subject matter: Ranging from purely personal, through hobby, with the far extreme being all business all of the time (no NASCAR).
3) Originality: Ranging from link-blog, in which blogger functions purely as Internet researcher and guide for readers, through link plus link-related commentary, with the far extreme being completely original content with no links.
(So far, I had three dimensions and was able to draw my classification scheme on a piece of paper. Then I perceived one more dimension and gave up on making a drawing.)
4) Accessibility: Ranging from the blogs we know now — completely public, accessible to anyone and easily found by search engines, through intracorporate-only or customer-only, with the far extreme being accessible only to small groups of friends or relatives (a web of personal invitation-only blogs functioning somewhat like the Yahoo group I currently enjoy with a small group of old friends).
Partly this fourth dimension will depend on intent, using technology to define access. Partly it will be a function of success in developing a broad readership, if desired.
I hope that by proposing this analytical model, I stimulate bloggers and businesses to become much more intentional in determining how, where, and why they choose to use blogging.
Ultimately blogging is an artistic/communications tool like a paintbrush or printing press, rather than a specific art form like an ink drawing, or oil painting, or sonnet, or short story. We’re all still developing and evolving the art forms!
Q. What are your thoughts on requiring employee education and common sense: is it any easier or more difficult to do it in this context or medium than any other (e.g., training employees to avoid gossip, trashing the company, disclosing confidential info, subtly or not so subtly harming the company’s image)?
A. Excellent question, Denise. Arguably, as blogging becomes more normative and accepted, there will be no need for a special blogging policy at all, except perhaps a few very specialized points, such as requiring a disclaimer in the blog if this is deemed necessary.
As a number of others in the blogosphere have pointed out, the employees who have been fired for blogging have generally said or done things that might have put their jobs at risk had the communication been through a different medium.
The key difference is that with blogging there is at least the perception by the employer that the communication is more dangerous because it is accessible to the entire world through the Internet.
The reality is there are so many web sites and blogs that often the blogger reaches no more people than juicy “water-cooler” gossip spreading by word of mouth.
In any event, many companies are developing blogging policies, and I would encourage this, provided they avoid excessive detail and legalese.
Because of the close connection between the conduct these policies need to address and conduct that is unacceptable through other means of communication, implementation of these policies is a good opportunity to re-examine and reinforce employee knowledge of existing policies on these subjects — such as confidentiality, trade secrets, defamation, disparagement.
