Blogging control

Posted Monday, July 7, 2008 by Ali Sales

Maybe you've seen this new report from Forrester Research, or just heard the buzz about it from MediaPost.

The 5 second overview is this: Fewer companies started corporate blogs in 2007 than in 2006.

Now the interesting parts are this:

Who Forrester paid attention to in the study

What caused the decline

First up, who Forrester paid attention to. Well, that would be Fortune 500 companies. Why is this problematic? Because I don't think that it paints a very accurate picture of what's happening within the business blogging landscape.

Here's why. Fortune 500 companies a) have huge budgets, which tends to squash creativity and humanization. Why do something like creating corporate weblogs when I can run a commercial that will reach 10 million people all at once? Old habits certainly die hard here.

b) Fortune 500 companies are the most afraid of blogs. Control and compliance is important to them, and with an increase (someone find this article, because I know it's out there) in employee-related blogging incidents, they're scared. And that fear prevents them from doing blogging the right way.

Hopefully that's a good start to getting the wheels spinning and not necessearily taking this report at face value. I have a lot more to say on the topic, but I'll be honest. It's 6pm and I need to be somewhere. More tomorrow.

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Business Blogging Question of the Week

Posted Wednesday, December 12, 2007 by Chris Baggott

This is a great question that came into Blogging Best Practices

...Our main hurdle is this, we can provide guidelines and tools to employees and let them blog at will. However, when the comments hit the fan, do we allow the bad coverage and address or just deny the bad coverage and act as if we can do no wrong?

Answer:

Great question Dan. With Compendium Blogware, all comments are moderated. The question is where do you draw the line on what gets published and what get's buried?

Blogging Best Practices call for as much transparency as possible. However, you of course want to screen out inappropriate material, off topic things and just basic immaturity.

However...the issue comes in about actual negative comments that might just be true. Every organization has to make their own decision but again, I think most Corporate Blogging strategies should consider that these are great opportunities to participate in the discussion.

You have to assume that if a person is motivated enough to post a negative comment to you...chances are they are going to tell others of there negative feelings as well. The key is to participate. Head off the discussion by explaining why this situation happend or how you have addressed a legitimate failure.

The general rule of thumb is that you would sure rather have people complain to you than feel they have no outlet and complain to the world in their own blog or social network. The conversation is going to happen weather you are there are not....so you better be participating.

Of course with easy to use blogging software, you at least have the ability through your blogging soltion to keep your business blogging under control.

Thanks for the question. Chris

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Risks in Corporate Blogging

Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 by Chris Baggott

So here is an interesting paper presented by a company called Proofpoint that has done a study on organizations concern (justified) on the lack of control over employee blogs.

Although this study really focuses on outbound email some highlights are specifically relevant to business blogs:

More than 1 in 5 US companies surveyed (21.4%) investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via a blog or message board posting. Nearly 1 in 5 (19.2%) US companies surveyed have disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies in the past 12 months. 9.1% reported terminating an employee for such a violation.

12.4% of US publicly-traded companies surveyed investigated the exposure of material fi nancial
information (such as unannounced quarterly results) via a blog or message board posting in the
past 12 months.

Blogs and message boards are also considered a signifi cant source of risk. 43.2% of compa-
nies surveyed expressed a high degree of concern about blog and message board postings
(43.7% for the largest companies surveyed).

The problem as I see it is twofold:

Most companies don’t give their employees the opportunity to blog within the Corporate environment. The reality in the world today is that many people are in fact passionate about where they work and what they do. This is a good thing!

But if these people don’t have a sanctioned outlet, then they naturally turn to one of the readily available blogging tools and express themselves on their own.

Without making this toooo commercial…..the answer is to incorporate an easy to use software system of corporate blogging that enables any one who wants to bog that outlet.

The second part of the problem is that the corporation needs a way to develop a workflow around this employee generated content. Look for systems that require approvals before any blog post goes live.

Given the right system of blogging control and compliance (along with Comment Control) having employees is a godsend. The more blogging an organization can solicit from their employees the better for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and exposing a more ‘human’ side of their organization.

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