Policies for employee blogging

More fuel for the discussion on why organizations must have clear policies in place concerning employee blogging, from Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg:

If you're an employee, and you identify yourself as such on your weblog, you better know what the ramifications will be at work. Frustration is always the result of expectation and unless everyone is one the same page, employees SHOULD have some trepidation. In many industries, employees may not know there are regulatory issues that cannot just be spoken of casually. This is not a new thing either. Most companies forbid employs to speak with journalists or media about their firms without media training or PR folks present. There's a reason for that. To that end though, it's important for every business to have a policy in place regarding personal weblogs and what can be said and what can't be said. The same way there are phone policies and e-mail policies, there need to be weblog policies. It's not that hard.

Michael made these comments in a post responding to Robert Scoble's post yesterday on the barriers to employee blogging.

Many organizations don't think twice about establishing clear polices about matters such as email practice and etiquette, how to use corporate branding and logos and, as Michael mentions, speaking to the media. So it must be with employee blogging (see my post last month: Blogging policies on the horizon).

From an organizational point of view, it's far better to embrace blogs within the overall communication framework and make it wholly clear what the parameters are. It's about managing potential risks for both the company and the employee.

Michael Gartenberg | Are you afraid to blog? You might have good reason to be afraid