Business and Blogging

Does Corporate Blogging Policy Development Need a Gee-up?

by Des Walsh on February 1st, 2007

I think a lot about corporate blogging policy, or - if you prefer - business blogging policy. That probably comes from all those years working in government - and subsequently consulting to governments - where everything had to have a policy framework and, in principle, expenditure and programs had to fit with that framework (yes, I know, only too well, about politicians bending - breaking? - the framework to suit their partisan or parish pump objectives, but I’m going for the higher ground here).

And having read several corporate blogging policies, including those listed by Fredrik Wackå back in June 2005 and earlier (November 2004) in this much-referenced post by Charlene Li, I thought I had a reasonable handle on what would go into such a policy. Which is why I thought it would be a fairly simple matter to suggest a few key principles and then provide some sample policies. Yes, I was aware that several (all?) of the examples had been around for a while, but that didn’t mean that every reader of this post would be aware of them or know where to find them.

Now I’m not so sure that the process would be simple, or easy. Because when I looked more closely at the examples, a few things started to bother me, including:

a) as far as I could see without making a very detailed study, none of the various sample policies seem to have been written after the first half of 2005 - has nothing changed since then?

b) most or all of what I had been thinking of as “corporate blogging policies” seemed to be less than what I would call a comprehensive policy, in that they seemed to be basically guidelines for blogging employees to observe (or else) - essential, but not the whole story

c) the examples all seemed to be from larger corporations - the principles and even the wording might work for small and microbusiness, but I could not find where anyone talked about this, much less that anyone had tested any of these guidelines in such an environment

There may well be companies which in the past couple of years have been quietly developing and refining their blogging policies. And there may be small and microbusinesses with comprehensive, effective policies. If so, their efforts do not seem to be showing up on Google or in any extended blog posts I’ve noticed.

Further, I would have thought that from a business owner’s viewpoint, a set of guidelines for employees blogging needs to be integrated with a marketing/communications policy, showing from a positive marketing viewpoint just where blogging fits in to the company’s growth strategy, and also with an articulated HR policy. 

On the HR issue, for example, the various policies include warnings and admonitions about what the company would perceive as inappropriate blogging activity: are companies developing documented processes for disciplinary action and levels of authority for management approval if someone wants to post something she feels might be contentious? Or is the attitude, “get it right or you could be out on your ear”?

Also while a large, well-heeled corporation, or even a small, well-heeled corporation for that matter, might have no difficulty in paying a corporate blogging consultant to come up with a company-specific, suitably worded policy document, I suspect that a lot of small business owners would find that a less than obviously necessary expenditure to undertake. 

So I intend to do two things:

a) set up a webpage on this site where I will progressively add samples of blogging policies as I come across them (and links to valuable background reading such as Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book and b5media leader Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing)

b) highlight the various sample policies and provide some comments.

And in all of this, a thought keeps niggling away: in 2007 should we be spending time on “corporate blogging policies” or something broader, such as “corporate social media policies” or “corporate Web 2.0 policies”? I think we do need corporate blogging policies, but in developing them it would be smart to look at the wider context and provide some hooks, maybe, in the policy framework, for further development.

What I see that I for one have been doing, in simply referring people back to the benchmark policies, is to potentially confuse them on how they should handle various blogging-related but disparate issues of corporate governance, employee relations, staff supervision, blogging etiquette, libel/defamation law, marketing strategies, blog writing styles, and so on.

It’s now time for some greater clarity. To answer my own question, as posed in the title of this post, yes, I do believe corporate blogging policy development needs a gee-up. And I hope Business and Blogging can play a useful part in that.

And I’m hoping someone who is really good at taxonomies will weigh in, on their own blog (please let us know) or in the comments here, about how these issues can best be framed so as to help the time-strapped, not necessarily tech-savvy business owner or executive.

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