Bill

If the blogger has a negative point-of-view, it will come out in everything they do, every contact with customers or other audiences. Their blogging just makes it a little more evident, a little more quickly.

Which points to another tool in the communicator’s quiver: blog searches. Communicators that want to be seen as strategic and vital to supporting their organization’s brands should monitor the blogosphere and the Internet regularly to identify emerging conversations that may effect their brands. The folks at Kryptonite, for example, didn’t see it coming when people started complaining about their locks being opened with a Bic pen a few years ago…and when they did figure it out, they didn’t come straight with consumers.

Blogs and other technologies provide employees with a potentially larger audience. They may or may not understand the responsibility that places on them. A corporate blogging policy should explain that responsibility.

With responsibility comes accountability, either at the corporate level (reprimand, termination, etc.) and the peer level. How popular is the blogger that drives down share price in a company that has a profit sharing plan?

We’ve been here before, with online forums, with Usenet, with e-mail.

Employees will blog about their employer if they are passionate, the issue is whether they are passionately positive or passionately negative. Most often, the corporate culture will determine that.

Like all those personal websites that popped up in the ’90s, bloggers will be perceived to have authority - or at least the inside scoop - whether they do or not. Readers will judge for themselves whether a blog is authoritative, believable and responsible.

Having technology does not guarantee it will be used or used effectively. Is everyone with access to MS Word or WordPerfect a writer? No.

Communicators and their organizations need to understand that it’s up to the organization to instil employees with the passion and authority to speak well of the employer.

The two requirements for employee blogging (as articulated by Scoble and his co-author, Shel Israel, in their book, “Naked Conversations”) are passion and authority. Chuck in AP has no authority about product, so he wouldn’t blog about it (other than expressing pride, perhaps, in a new product launch or some other achievement), but he WOULD blog about getting bills paid on time.

Finally, as Mike Manuel pointed out in a post to his blog (”Media Guerrilla”), the company would want to make sure all employees had accurate information so they would deliver a consistent message through their various blogs.

Ultimately, though, leaders routinely ask their employees to evangelize the company and its products to friends, neighbors, and relatives. (Consider GlaxoSmithKline’s initiative to get 8,000 US salespeople to practice PR in the field!) Expanding that audience through a blog is just that — expanding the audience for messages the company already expects you to deliver on its behalf.

I love the liver analogy! And it makes perfect sense to me that Chuck should sit quietly doing his paperwork in the accounting department rather than spilling the beans to the press about all the numbers in front of him. It does make one wonder.

The one thing that does seem to be emerging is a self-policing of sorts. If an employee, or customer spouts off about something that is false or premature, they are called on it, viciously sometimes. The rules of conduct are different, but they do exist. There’s some comfort in that. It’s fascinating to see it all unfold.

The following post is a reply to a post that appeared on the IABC Employee Communication Commons Blog. The title of the post is: Thinking about Blogs.Thanks for the post Natasha. The more I look at the ideal world of

The more I look at the ideal world of corporate blogging, and the “real” world of organizational communication, I see a fundamental disconnect. The issue is that although technology is in place for employees to have a dialog with customers, they are still representing the business and there should be some form of consistency and coherence to the communication.

In other words, organizations are collections of people who make workgroups. Those groups make business units and (if your lucky) those business units make a cohesive-functioning organization. It’s like a body of people making a whole. Let me play devils advocate. I need an Accounts Payable (AP) department to ensure bills are payed the same way my body needs a liver. They serve very important functions. However, I don’t expect that my liver will have a conversation with my wife tomorrow morning (and I preferred if it didn’t!) Just as I would prefer if Chuck in AP didn’t have a running dialogue about our upcoming product release with customers, the press, investors etc. make sense?

Please punch holes in my analogy. I am not against blogs per se. I see a use for them as informal knowledge sharing tools inside organizations. I am just struggling with the concept of open communication with all from all. Thoughts?