RoboGeek

A look at another corporate blogging guideline in mid-development Here's an interesting peek into how another corporation is starting to encourage their employees to "blog".  Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2  What's most interesting is they apparently are revising their blogging guidelines based on input from the public.  If that's not an exercise in transparency, I don't know what is.  On the other hand it's clear they have a degree of the top-down approach to encouraging blogging, what with a BOC (Blogging Oversight Committee) made (it seems) of executives.

The guidelines themselves appear to be reasonable.  It does contain the typical double message of openness and transparency while guideline #7 admonishes the employee to "keep secrets".  Sigh.  Blogging and transparency are such a challenge to "business as usual" where BAU includes the corporation keeping most of its activities secret ...

I expect the employees reading those guidelines to be just as confused as I am ... just what items of information are we to keep secret, and which are free to be shared?  Confusion like this always comes when there's a double message.  The prototypical double message comes, for example, with your parents claiming "I love you" while at the same time spanking you.  In this case the employee is asked to be open and transparent, but if they're too transparent they'll get a modern corporate form of spanking, and compounding the problem is the line isn't terribly clear as to what's to be kept secret and what isn't.

The most interesting thing about their policy is something they aren't doing.  Rather than host the employee blogs as a company service, they ask the prospective blogging employee to set up a blog using a public blogging service.  Once they have it configured to their liking, they email the B.O.C. who will, if it meets the sniff test, enter it into the company blog aggregator. 

This greatly simplifies the company's  IT requirements, because blog aggregator software is simple to set up and it pretty much runs itself once it's going.  It puts a little burden on the employee, but probably not too great.  The blogging services do a great job of making it simple for people to get started in blogging.

It's an interesting form of outsourcing, isn't it?  They're pushing what could be a corporate expense over to third parties.  It's worth pondering for a few moments whether this (hosting the employees blogs) is an expense which the company should rightly spend, or whether it's "okay" for them to push it off to third parties.

The only solid result I come up with is the loss of inbound links.  As the company's employees make postings they will occasionally get links from elsewhere.  The technical term is "inbound links".  Inbound links help somewhat with search engine ranking.

By having the employee blogs hosted elsewhere the inbound links will help the search engine ranking of the blog host, and not the corporation.  If, instead, the corporation hosted the blog themselves, the inbound links would help the corporation.

Another solid idea that arises is, what happens when an employee leaves the company.  This question comes up from time to time on Sun's blogger email alias.  Do we remove the departed employees blog entirely?  Do we leave it there, but prevent further posting?  Do we allow the former employee to continue blogging?  And, finally, how can we robustly connect employment status with the above decisions?

By having the employee arrange hosting, the questions are simplified.  Clearly when an employee leaves the company they can be easily removed from the company aggregation.  The former employee can continue writing their existing blog without muss or fuss.  I'm wondering what the former employee should do with old postings about their old company?  Leave them there?  That's probably up to the individual, and it's clearly not covered in the policy.

The HR systems which register whether an individual is an employee, or not, may not be easy to connect with other systems.  In fact there may be laws preventing such connection.  How is the IT department to know when the employee has become a former employee?  Hence, when or how will IT know when to remove that former employee from the company blog aggregation?

UPDATE:  I forgot to include a thought.  Perhaps there's a worthy business to pursue in providing a complete corporate blogging service to corporations.  Setting up a blogging service is probably outside the competency of the typical corporate IT department.  Even though it's not terribly hard to get expertise in installing, configuring and maintaining a corporate blogging service, some corporations clearly will want to outsource it.



(2006-01-19 09:31:09.0) Permalink