Check out IdeaFlow by Renee Hopkins Callahan for the latest on innovation trends and practices. On her radar screen: the creativity of bipolar children, Democrats' call for an "Innovation Agenda", grocery store innovations, creating a culture of business experimentation, and more.
Littler Mendelson: DOOCES WILD: How Employers Can Survive the New Technological Poker Game of Employee Blogging. Poker game? Though I like the piece and think it takes a balanced and sensible approach to the issues it addresses, the title is yet another unfortunate example of the breathless, "omigod!" hype around businesses, employees, and the participatory Web. Employees with blogs or podcasts aren't playing poker any more or less than those with telephones, email, Skype, IM, or the myriad other means by which they might engage in conversation with those outside the workplace. I hate to metaphor-pick, but feel compelled to point out it's more apt to say that while blogging and podcasting might up the ante, the "game" has been around for centuries.
SearchCIO has a report on executive("C")-level bloggers and says they "Follow the Rules." That's one way of looking at it. Another is, they're changing them.
The article is worth reading for many reasons, chief (sorry) among them being this quote from one of Jonathan Schwartz's April 1 entries, which I'd missed until now: "The downside of being an officer of a public corporation is that it's very difficult to write a good April Fools blog without feeling the need for serious engagement from the corporate legal team."
Simply Hired's Dave McClure announces Simply Fired — "If you don't laugh, you'll cry" — and kicks things off with Mark Jen's story. Brilliant.
Three students at the School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University (SCI/NTU) surveyed over 1,000 bloggers worldwide on ethical issues as their undergraduate honors thesis. Then, appropriately enough, they published their results as a blog: Weblog Ethics Survey Results. Some interesting nuggets:
The August issue of Fast Company has this succinct and on point guide to Business Blogging for Beginners (which is useful even, or maybe particularly, if you're not into cocktail parties).
IBM has released a trial enterprise blogging tool that will integrate with its Workplace Collaboration Services: "Weblog Preview provides the basic functionality usually expected of personal weblogs. For instance, Weblog Preview supports the posting of content in a journal format, emphasizing a personal point of view. The weblogs are public by default; that is, any authenticated Workplace user can read the blog. In addition, all authenticated users can comment on or link to the posts via 'permalinks.' The weblog owners, however, can restrict access to their blogs via the Workplace membership portlet, just as with any Workplace component." I don't know much about "portlets," but this strikes me as a positive and useful step in encouraging weblog use by businesses. Via Techworld, which has this quote from IBM's Ed Brill: "By putting that into Workplace, we are saying that we expect everybody in an organisation to be able to be a publisher, not just a consumer of information." Mr. Brill's blog looks like an excellent related resource.
Here's a brief and sensible set of Guidelines Useful in Blogging aimed at businesses, from the London Free Press and authored by Ontario lawyer David Canton.
I mentioned the other day that I was interested in reading fresh perspectives on the issue of corporate blogging policies that reflected the views of actual bloggers.
One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Pollard, provides a great example of what I would like to see more of in his excellent and thoughtful post called "What Should Your Corporate Policy Be On Blogs?" I highly recommend it as a fresh take on the corporate blogging discussion.
An update on my recent post about blogging policies:
If you've followed the comments, you know that I've now had the chance to download and read the Covington & Burling article mentioned in that post. I've been thinking about the next-to-last paragraph in that article that says:
"Clearly, not every employee blog will reflect poorly on an employer or disclose sensitive information. On the contrary, blogging employees may be among the most creative, entrepreneurial and technologically savvy members of an organization, and may serve as powerful advocates for the companies they work for. Given that, and in light of the risks in banning off-site blogging, the better approach may be to balance the positive aspects of the blog with appropriate safeguards against the greatest risks."
I like this paragraph and wish that it would have led the article, but I want to focus on a couple of points raised by this paragraph.
Sentence #1 reflects the most common assumptions about employees who blog. If you make those assumptions, your blog policy will have a certain kind of substance and tone, the kind that lawyers excel at drafting.
Consider sentence #2, which reflects my general assumption about bloggers. Assume for a moment that your employees who blog are the types of employees described in sentence #2. Now aks yourself the following three questions:
1. How would the tone and substance of your blogging policy change?
2. How will those employees respond to a policy that is written based on the assumptions in sentence #1 of that paragraph in the article?
3. How wise is it to adopt some kind of "standard" or "one size fits all" policy to cover blogging?
Now, go take a look at Pollard's article
I've looked all over the Covington & Burling website and can't find that the firm has a blog. Would someone help me out by directing me to the URL of the C & B blog? I'm sure that I'm just overlooking it.
Anyone else wonder about the credibility of advice on blogging policies from law firms that do not have blogs? I'm not being critical - I just raise the question.
I haven't had the chance to read the C & B article yet, because it locked up my browser when I tried to download it. Perhaps that makes me a bit irritable, but I still have a funny feeling that the article will take a rather negative view of blogging and highlight lots of dangers of blogging that can be solved only by using the services of a firm like C & B.
Certainly, law firms have every right to take these marketing approaches, and I'm not being critical, but I personally am more interested in the conclusions and recommendations of lawyers who have experience with their own blogs than those who seem to be jumping on a fad of creating a blogging policy practice area.
I'll reserve judgment on the C & B article until I am able to read it.
I still like the discussions and resources we've mentioned and collected on Between Lawyers are the best place to start research on "blogging policy" issues, but I may be a little biased.
SF Gate has a good article today on Writing the codes on blogs: "Jeff Sandquist, a Microsoft manager, said blogging has become so commonplace at the Redmond, Wash., firm that employees conversing about specific topics typically ask each other: 'Are you planning on blogging that?'"
Fredrik Wacka has "compared and categorized the corporate blogging policies and guidelines of IBM, Yahoo! (pdf), Hill & Knowlton, Plaxo, Thomas Nelson, Feedster, Groove and Sun." See Policies compared: Today's corporate blogging rules, and Frederik's CorporateBloggingBlog in general is a terrific resource.
Internetnews.com reports on Yahoo!'s blogging policy, posted by Jeremy Zawodny:
Any mention of things that haven't been made public is a no-no, of course, and bloggers are advised to notify the corporate PR department if nosy journalists contact them.
They're also encouraged to contact members of the relevant Yahoo team before criticizing their work.
When you see the word "public speaking" in a sentence, substitute the word "blog" to see if the sentence still makes sense (or is interesting):
1, Every law firm should have lawyers who do public speaking.
2, There should be public speaking risk assessment teams.
3. The consultant charges $500 a month to teach the firm's lawyers to do public speaking.
4, What will public speaking be like in 5 years?
5. Every lawyer has a moral obligation to do public speaking.
6. How will public speaking affect the practice of law?
Hey, this is kind of fun.
When you see the word "golf" in a sentence, substitute the word "blog" to see if the sentence still makes sense (or is interesting):
1, Every law firm should have lawyers who golf.
2, There should be golf risk assessment teams.
3. The consultant charges $500 a month to teach the firm's lawyers to golf.
4, What will golf be like in 5 years?
5. Every lawyer has a moral obligation to golf.
6. How will golf affect the practice of law?
I was struck by the fact that a firm's exposure to errant golf shots and bad behavior on the golf course might well exceed the dangers of lawyer blogging. Oh, where is the outcry and the call for golfing policies?
Shel Holtz: "There's nothing new about the notion of a communication tool poorly applied."
When you see the word "telephone" in a sentence, substitute the word "blog" to see if the sentence still makes sense (or is interesting):
When you see the word 'blog' in a sentence, substitute the word 'brochure' to see if the sentence still makes sense (or is interesting):
Here are some starter sentences:
1. Every law firm should have a blog.
2. There should be blog risk assessment teams.
3. The consultant charges $500 a month to write the firm's blog.
4. What will blogs be like in 5 years?
5. Every lawyer has a moral obligation to blog.
6. How will blogs affect the practice of law?
Fredrik Wacka: "I think this approach is something we will see more of. And I think it's a genuinely bad idea."
Chad Dickerson will be part of an excellent looking panel at the upcoming Syndicate conference. Voices From Within, Harnessing the Power of the Individual will touch on many of the interrelationships between businesses and blogging we've discussed here. See Chad's post for the details and how you can participate.
Robert Scoble, on IBM's new blogging policy: "I guess my style of blogging wouldn't be welcome at IBM."
The NewPRWiki, a collaboration among some clueful PR professionals to share ideas and information, includes a list of resources aimed at legal issues related to business blogging.
Futher to our discussion here that blogging is not necessarily all that different from technological waters companies have been navigating for some time: Evan Brown has a write-up of a recent federal trial court decision that stands behind an employer's ability to fire those who violate its email policy.
Now available at IT Conversations: my interview with George Lenard, Steve Rubel, and Jeff Seul on issues related to companies and blogging. The show notes add a few links to those listed here previously, and the conversation gets into the professional-personal life gray areas Dennis and I have been discussing.
Denise mentioned the intriguing question of where the status of employee ends and that of private citizen begins.
I'm fascinated how discussions of the implications of blogging so frequently lead to fundamental issues like this one.
Dancing around the discussion of blogging policies is some sense that an employer can reach too far in trying to control the private life and behavior of an employee. The line is not as easy to draw as people might initially think.
If an employer reaches too far, the employer will lose its best and most creative employees. If an employer doesn't reach far enough, especially if it does not follow-up with education and training about laws, regulations and other rules, the employer runs the risk of legal and other problems.
It's interesting to compare the multi-paged, heavy-handed and legalistic approaches employers take with their adult employees to the shorter, simpler, more direct and generally more respectful approach advocated for Internet safety in the often-recommended family Internet use contracts for teenagers, such as this one, this one, this one and this one.
Interesting exercise: compare your Internet usage policy to these "contracts" and consider which approach might give you better results.
Tom Zeller in the New York Times, When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?: "None of this, of course, answers the question of where the status of employee ends and that of private citizen begins." That's the part of all this I find the most intriguing. (See also Worthwhile Magazine.)
The article quotes our neighbor and Corante COO Stowe Boyd, who isn't happy about the conclusions to be drawn: be aware that an employer might react negatively to something, or blog anonymously. Me? I like the comment from Technorati's Adam Hertz with which the article wraps up. It has wisdom for all concerned:
"I had a high school teacher,' he recalled, 'who used to say 'I have only two rules: Don't roller-skate in the hallway and don't be a damn fool."
Great post, Dennis. I can only speak as someone who primarily helps folks sort out problems once they've arisen, but my common sense gene tells me that you're right to put the focus on overarching, big picture goals and not minutia. So here's my request for a "Part 3:" in today's world how do you do training that people will actually attend, enjoy (I mean, as much as possible), retain, and feel motivated to live out in their daily lives? My firm has some interesting ideas along these lines. I also was intrigued by this interview with Dr. Henry Jenkins at IT Conversations regarding the learning power of game play. What do you think of these concepts, and what else would you suggest when it comes to communicating through training?
I’ve earlier mentioned the importance of communication as an underestimated part of a sound legal approach to technology use or blogging policies.
The second often-neglected and not-usually-thought-of-as-legal-work part of these policies is TRAINING. In my recent presentation on this topic, I noted that a written policy without accompanying training all but guarantees later problems.
Marty mentioned some of the risks that use of technology, including blogging, can raise. I can mention several more, especially for executives in publicly-traded companies or those in companies working toward IPOs. Law schools teach lawyers to spot all of those issues.
I had an instructive conversation with a friend of mine on the plane trip to Chicago for ABA TECHSHOW. I told her that I was speaking on technology use policies. She said that her organization needed to put together a new policy. As we chatted about the types of issues we see today, I could see that, rather than helping, I was making the task seem more daunting, which wasn’t my intention.
I changed the conversation to focus more about whether a “cover every possibility” approach made sense for her or anyone else and whether there were more reasonable approaches to take.
My basic premise is that technology changes so quickly that the more precise you are, the more likely your policy will be outdated and be difficult to interpret in the future. My second premise is that the ways you want people to behave seldom change. My third premise is that if people understand what the risks and dangers are, they will tend to make good decisions. You are free to disagree with any of those premises.
To me, then, a good policy should be based on setting out your core principles (don’t break the law; don’t put key systems or information at risk; behave like you are in a work environment, not a frat house) and setting out the most important rules. Then, you put serious effort into training people how to use technology in ways that do not violate those principles and rules.
Here’s a favorite example of mine. You will see many policies that prohibit people from introducing a virus into the office system. At the same time, there is no effort made to teach people safe behavior with respect to virus issues. As a result, the office consistently gets hit with viruses and it will be difficult to discipline a problem employee because there will be many other offenders. You have a great usage policy in the legal sense, but as a practical matter, it’s kind of a disaster waiting to happen.
The more that people understand the whys and hows, the better job they’ll do at behaving in the ways that you want them to do under your policy. That’s training. That’s also common sense. It’s also something that can get forgotten when you focus solely on the legal issues and see the item “get blogging use policy done” on your legal to-do list.
The two most commonly overlooked components of a technology use policy or blogging policy are communications and training. Interestingly, companies rarely involve lawyers in either of these issues, admittedly, sometimes for good reasons. Let me tell you that if you don't address these practical issues, you probably won't get good value for your dollars spent on legal services.
I'll give you these tips for free. You can thank me if you think they are helpful - that will help my feel like I'm doing some good.
In this post, I want to talk about communications. I’ll talk about training tomorrow.
If someone took a close look at the cases involving bloggers and others getting into trouble for violating company policies, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that nearly all of them involved some kind of communications failure. As a practical matter, I suspect that any existing policies and restrictions were not, as a practical matter, effectively communicated to the person who got in trouble. In fairness to some employers, however, the communications breakdown might have happened when a person failed to read a policy or listen to instructions despite an employer's best effort.
An important part of any usage policy is simply getting into a form and format that people can easily read, and will read. This involves factors like readability, headings, bullet points, highlighting the main points, sequencing of categories, organization and even font selection and sizing. Lawyers are not known for excelling at any of these areas. I always like to see clients who want to improve the look and feel of legal documents.
When I speak on this topic, I emphasize that you need to think carefully about who the audience is for your policy and when and under what circumstances they will be reading the policy. The fact is that people will rarely read your policy for the fun of it. They will be reading it either to determine whether a specific activity is or isn’t allowed and commonly when there is a serious problem with potentially serious consequences.
If you have a policy that is 25 pages of single-spaced, dense legalese, people simply will not be able to find the answers that they want. Ideally, you want to make these policies very usable.
I think that you also want to be realistic about whether employees will read these policies. If you stick them up in an obscure place on your intranet or bury them in a stack of other paperwork, they probably will not get read. You also indicate that by your behavior that these policies are not all that important and that they are simply more “paperwork.”
Compare an approach where you take 15 minutes of a meeting to go over the highlights of the policy – the big points – and explain the need for people to follow the policy. Hand them a one page bullet-pointed summary at the end of the meeting. If you also use the meeting to confirm your trust in your employees and your appreciation for the value that they bring to your company, your chances of avoiding technology use problems increase dramatically.
Now, I think that this is all common sense. However, by treating blogging or, more accurately, technology use policies as purely legal issues and simply treating them as necessary legal obligations, you run the risk of neglecting common sense practices, like basic communications, the neglect of which will increase your chances of later legal difficulties.
Have you really communicated what policies you have? Care to see the results of a quiz for your employees about what is in the policies? See the problem?
Next stop: the training component.
Denise, here's another item to add to the mix for your next Sound Policy program.
Randy Holloway alerted me to a CNN Money article on "blogging safely" that he compared to the classic documentary scare film, Reefer Madness, because of its breathless alarmism.
First of all, I admire Randy for actually reading any article on blogging in 2005 that defines blogs in the opening sentence as "personal Web diaries." In my own system of scanning and triaging what I read, I'd move on to something else immediately.
In fairness, the article does point to some recent "guidelines" from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that offer some common sense approaches for employees who blog. And, in fairness, the article does a good job of summarizing some of the relevant legal concerns. It's unfortunate that the author didn't have the chance to read Randy's post about the article to see how a blogger like Randy can use his "personal diary" to write a good article that makes a good point, offers a balanced approach and provides some humor.
But, gee whiz, the hyperbole setting for the CNN Money article is turned all the way up to 10 and the Reefer Madness reference does seem appropriate.
I also got just a tiny sense that perhaps the author is not a blogger and probably hasn't read a lot of blogs.
The money quote:
"The Safest Way of All This isn't in the how-to blog guide, but remember the old days of paper and pen diaries? True, the audience is limited to the authors themselves and maybe a snooping sibling or two. Ones with a lock and key work best."
I'm tempted to write an article about how to write safely about blogging for traditional news publications. I'm not sure that CNN Money understands the major hit its credibility takes when they publish pieces like this one. In my own case, I've knocked CNN Money's credibility as a news resource way down as a result of this article. I've moved Randy's way up.
Look, the issues of blogging by employees are complex and a large number of factors must be considered. Articles like this one don't help the needed discussion (except to the extent that they provoke discussion).
I'm not sure that any company seriously wants to adopt a "put your blog under lock and key" blogging policy, especially if they want to keep their best and most creative and innovative employees. The issues of confidentiality, trade secrets, who speaks on behalf of the company, criticism of the company, and others are important issues that should be addressed (although I'm still surprised to find that they aren't already addressed by exisitng policies in most companies). The key in adopting policies is to balance the competing concerns and to reflect the philosophy and culture of your organization. That's not a purely "legal" decision.
Let me point again to the set of handout materials I prepared for my recent presentation at ABA TECHSHOW on technology use policies, where I tried to take a practical. "fair and balanced" (oops, that's CNN's competitor's tag line, isn't it?) approach to the issues involved in putting together these policies. You can get a PDF file (about 100KB) of that handout here.
My concern is that the more alarmist and sensational the reporting, the more difficult it will be for employers and employees to reach a reasonable balance in developing policies about blogging.
As I said in my presentation, I'd like to see policies based on a notion of "use common sense and good judgment," with the policies specifying the details necessary to help people stay within that philosophy and comply with applicable laws, regulations and contractual requirements. That's quite different than the "use a lock and key" approach. Both are possibilities, but I think your most valuable employees will prefer my approach to the "lock and key" approach.
In today's efforts to land and retain the best talent, you will want to give plenty of thought to the real world consequences of your blogging policies, not just the purely legal issues. Overly alarmist articles are not helpful to your decision-making.
On Wednesday we'll be recording the next Sound Policy show, which will focus on the interrelationship between businesses, weblogs, and employees. It'll be great to talk these issues over with lawyer and employment law blogger George Lenard, PR strategist and blogger Steve Rubel, and Groove Networks General Counsel (and newly minted Microsoftie) Jeff Seul. Here are some links that will help inform our discussion. If you have others to suggest, please let me know.
(Ok, better stop there for now, we try to keep these things to 45 minutes!)
EFF: How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). (Via Boing Boing) Someone should now write the business side guidelines, "How to Harness the Power of Your Workforce's DIY Spirit, Enthusiasm, and Creativity (About Work or Anything Else)." (Wait: someone did!)