Blog Policies: Focus on the People, Not the Platform
Last week at Web 2.0 I sat in on a workshop that the law firm Fenwick & West was hosting on corporate blogging. In short, it was a good discussion and it reiterated what a lot of the sticky legal issues are around corporate and employee blogs and what ultimately companies can (and should) be doing to address them. It occurred to me, however, after the second or third “dooced blogger study” that blog policies are, generally speaking, really shortsighted — which got me thinking…
Why are we creating corporate policies that are based on platforms, when we should be creating policies that are based on behaviors?
Don’t get me wrong, I think blog policies are useful and for now they serve a purpose, but if you strip the best blog policy down to its core, it’s nothing more than a company guide for self expression and a basic set of expectations for “good corporate behavior.” It shouldn’t matter what platform an employee’s using for expression, who cares? Yesterday it was message boards and email, today it’s blogs and podcasts, tomorrow’s it’s who knows what. The platforms will change, but the underlying principles that guide sensable employee behavior probably won’t.
That said, it seems to me that companies should be exploring ways they can broaden the scope of their policy-thinking or at very least broaden the definition of their exisiting guidelines. Perhaps a corporate Social Media policy is one way of moving things in that direction…
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