Business and Blogging

Protecting Your Ideas in a Business Blog

by Des Walsh on January 11th, 2007

Talking to business owners about blogging, I find one of the questions that comes up frequently, in a variety of formulations, is about how you can have a business blog without giving away all your good ideas, your intellectual property.

My hunch, after a number of these conversations, is that the paradigm, the mental framework with which a lot of non-bloggers, or not-yet-bloggers, approach the question of blogging for their business is that blogging is a way of keeping a diary online. Nothing wrong with that explanation as far as it goes - a perfectly legitimate way of talking about blogging. And a quite rational inference to be drawn from holding that paradigm is that, as in a diary you “spill the beans” to yourself, so in a blog, construed as an online diary, maybe you are expected to spill the beans to several million people.

In that line of thinking, and given how jealously, and often how expensively, companies and individual entrepreneurs, inventors, creative people guard their ideas, their knowledge - and rightly so - it is understandable that some people just don’t get how a blog could ultimately be anything but a major liability for their business.

Which is why I tend to take the conversation away from the “diary” concept, explain that blogging technology is no longer the preserve just of teenage diary-keepers and techies managing projects, and focus on the idea of the blog being simply part of a set of newer, arguably more effective ways to communicate more directly with customers and prospective customers.

But that in itself does not always take away concern about people having their ideas stolen.

My own view is that, as a general principle, it is perfectly feasible to have an interesting blog about your company, your business, your area of professional interest, and not give away the keys to the intellectual property safe.

For anyone who does not think that possible, I would ask whether at a business function or just sitting in a coffee shop with friends, they are able to discuss their business, or industry, or the challenges people in their industry face regularly, without giving away their company’s intellectual property. And would they be able to send someone an email, extending that conversation, again without spilling the beans?

The answer is generally that they could and often do have those conversations and send those emails, without a sense of risk. In other words, they are filtering, consciously or subconsciously, what they say or type.

Then I encourage them to think of blogging as like being in a conversation in a coffee shop or sending an email.

Another, perhaps more radical, way of looking at the challenge of safeguarding your ideas is expressed in the following quote which I found on The Gurteen Knowledge Website.

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

                                                      Howard Aiken

But I do believe that as blogging by businesses becomes more widespread there will be increasing attention paid to these issues around effective blogging and the effective protection of intellectual property.

Share This

Related Stories

• Six Gift Ideas for Business Bloggers
• Business Blogging on Purpose
• How Can We Blog and Protect Our IP?
• Dell: A Blogging Success Story?
• Prevent Blogging Burnout - Six Questions to Keep You Fresh

POSTED IN: General, Knowledge Management, Risk Management, Skills