[BloggerCon] Halley
[At BloggerCon, Day 2]
After the World’s (intentionally) Worst Introduction by Ed Cone, Halley talks about a hypothetical case study she wrote for The Harvard Business Review about an employee, “GloveGirl,” who has a great blog about her company that on occasion blurts out uncomfortable truths (and perhaps an occasional error). The company doesn’t know what to do with her.
I was one of the “expert commentators” (hah!) in the article, and I wrote that the problem is mainly one of metadata: it needs to be clear on her site that she’s not writing for the company. Phil Wolff takes a harder line: she’s an employee and should not be allowed to disclose information about the company and is at risk of creating a hostile environment by talking about her love life.
Jon Udell says that blogging is more like collaboration than like a performance, and so GloveGirl ought to be encouraged because she’s extending collaboration to the customers. The line, he says, is necessarily fuzzy. Ed adds that this is what the Dean campaign is doing: the comments are the bloggers, and you just have to put up with the ones who are jerks.
Halley asks what the perfect tool would be for corporate blogging, allowing you to make some posts private to particular groups. Someone recommends LiveJournal. Open Text Livelink has (or is about to have) blogs as part of their corporate intranet collaborative suite, and SocialText also is headed towards corporate, in-house blogging groups. (Disclosure: I was a VP at Open Text and am on the BoA of SocialText. And I’m keynoting the Open Text user conference.)
Phil is looking for a lawyer to write up a model of an employment agreement that covers blogging. Interesting.
Halley says she’s working on a piece caled “How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sales Force in Ten Easy Steps.”
Good, lively session.
(By the way, Ed Cone today suggests that Yom Kippur become a national holiday: “Yom Kippur is a day of introspection and not eating, and if there was ever a culture in need of introspection and not eating, we’re it.” )
Categories: Uncategorized dw
re Phil’s search for a policy – does he have a problem with Groove’s policy? http://www.groove.net/weblogpolicy/
I’m looking for language that bloggers can take to their boss, HR, and legal, to carve out specifics: Who owns their blog at home, despite posting from work. Defining that posts on internal blogs are severable, so that issues of relevance to work are determined at the post level, not at the blog level (don’t kill my blog for one inappropriate post). Permission to take a copy of my blog with me when I leave, for my own reading and recall of events. That the company will make a copy available to me if they should choose to stop operating or sharing blogs. That I won’t be harmed just for posting to my outside blogs, that my public speech is preapproved provided I agree to narrow protection of company secrets; some companies claim that anything said on company time/property is proprietary, and this switch that.
Generally, I want blog equity and limited immunity.
BloggerCon Redux
I had an excellent time at BloggerCon 2003.
It wouldn’t matter: we’ve already had holidays (eg – Armistice Day) that were supposed to be for introspection (or at least reflection). They all get perverted into being about shopping or eating or both.