"Lawyers can give you many reasons why corporate blogging is a really bad idea", says Pinsent Masons partner Struan Robertson, who runs the very good tech/law webzine Out-Law, as the session on Dos and Don't of Corporate Blogging session begins...

• Risk of defamation


• Blogging staff exposing undesirable information (ie. Microsoft bloggers reporting "low morale" at the Redmond, WA, company following news it has delayed the release of upcoming OS Vista again)


• Staff committing racial/sexual harrassment by blog.


• Risk of posting something that could be construed as insider trading.

But, if you're considering a corporate blogging project, let's chill out - only about one in a thousand potential defamation cases comes to bear, says Struan.

Do draw up a corporate blogging policy, he adds. I've had experience of this and it's right - codifying rules and regulations helps iron out any future potential difficulties or sticky situations. When I last looked at drawing up a blogging policy, Sun's was one of those looked at for inspiration.

14.58 - Phillippe Borremans, who has many employees blogging at IBM, developed its corporate blogging guidelines by seeding a conversation on a wiki; hundreds of employees collaboratively refined the policy until they had something they could hand to lawyers for approval. "If you don't have guidelines, don't blog", Phillippe says. "On the other hand, if you want your people to blog, don't impose guidelines; make them part of [the development of guidelines], then hand it to the lawyers. You need to put it into a context and specifically explain to them why you want them to blog. Philippe calls this "thought leadership".



IBM's policy is publicly available and links with the company's conduct-of-business guidelines governing such issues as talking with the media.

15.05 - Genie Lutz of PricewaterhouseCoopers says her company deals in intellectual capital, so it was a good idea to let PWC's experts bring their knowledge to the debate using blogs. Interestingly, Genie says that under Financial Services Authority guidelines, PWC must warn blog readers that its blogs should not be construed as financial advise, they're just personal commentary. Does that nullify the whole purpose of the effort? Maybe; it's a shame that PWC has to distance itself from its employees' expertise in that way. Still, I'm sure it's just a regulatory issue and that readers will indeed take the opinions of a PWC analyst on board when making decisions - else, why read it in the first place? I could only find one PWC blog easily.

Pretty unanimous here, dear reader - all the panellists say a corporate blogging effort should set out guidelines at the outset so everyone knows where they stand. The bottom line is - by all means blog, but cover your ass. If you have a link to your corporate blogging guidelines, do share them with us. I'd like to point you back to the post in which Ethan Kaplan wrestles with just what on earth "corporate blogging" means.

15.13 - Philippe says "we didn't only [offer] blogging, but promoted [it]" through the intranet and other staff communication channels. That's an interesting point about starting a corporate blogging enterprise - the old adage "if you build it, they will come" doesn't apply here; sometimes, even the most enthusiastic employees, the first to bang on your door for the ability to write through the medium of a blog, end up writing one entry and then nothing else. So it seems it's important to ensure there is continual employee awareness of blog possibilities and practices if you don't want the project to grind to a screeching halt.

15.22 - The panel is rounding off by talking about defamation. It's important to note that the internet is subject to the laws of the real world, of course. That means you can defame somebody.



-- Rob