Corporate Blogger Policy
Is it time for an open source blogger policy and procedures document?
Corporate blogging is becoming more and more popular, it:
- Raises the visibility of the company, products and/or services;
- Provides information and services to the online community;
- Tends to spark ideas and concepts from outside your organisation and much more . . .
With this said, blogging in the corporate sphere and in general raises a number of concerns ranging from privacy to censorship. Sarah Turner of BlogSecurity released some excellent articles around some of these areas.
Some interesting reads include:
It seems many companies are coming up with their own blogging policies, for example I believe Microsoft’s blogging policy consists of two words, "Be smart". The software giant has been admonished for not having such policies.
Lorelle’s post really got me thinking . . . should we come up with an open source blogging policy that covers all the needed areas, does one already exist? is it worthwhile?
If such a document was created it would have to cover areas such as, legalities, censorship, NDA’s, privacy, security and much more.
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Comments
Interesting yes, but can you visualise it being utilised in a standard like ISO27001 (BS7799)? Thats really the question.
I’m in the UK. There are also bloggers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I understand there are even a few bloggers in the U.S. :-)
Your idea of covering legalities (and probably censorship) is going to be a huge undertaking to cover even just the few different English-speaking territories… Frankly, I think it’s pointless. If you come up with a document which only documents/encourages US laws, the first thing I’ll do is laugh at it/you. Then I’ll get pissed that you think you can make me follow your laws. By then, you’ve lost any respect that you’ve started out with.
However… Policy doesn’t necessarily mean legality. It would probably be easier to to write and encourage some sort of “moral code”.
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BTW I just tried to post this comment from Safari 3.0.3 (beta) on a Mac – with JavaScript enabled. And your new SpamBlam blocker blocked my comment claiming JavaScript was required. Let’s hope my Firefox works better. Please investigate! :)
Gary, I am in the UK as well :)
The project would have to be broken down with legalities and censorship as a seperate portion of the overall document. If the general policy succeeded in the UK, others can easily adopt it; however, at the moment its all just ideas in the air.
Spambam note taken, thanks.
I’d say that one is definitely required and personally I think that it’d be very interesting to read.