Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Trevor Jonas, Bite Communications | bitemarks
EDITORS’ CHOICE | Challenges of Institutional Blogs

Over the past year-and-a-half, the blogosphere has gone through quite a bit of transition. What was once the ‘Wild West’ has turned into a slightly more lawful online society. At this time last year, anything and everything being posted on blogs was considered by many to be OK. Then there came the well-publicized employee firings for posts made on personal blogs-which forced people to think more about what should and should not be made available for all to see. One thing that has become clear from all this is that corporations need to weave blogging into existing employee communications policies.

I know a lot of the early adopters view policies and corporate adoption as the beginning of the end for blogging. To me, it’s simply the natural evolution of a really cool, powerful technology. There are countless stories about companies that have launched corporate blogs and have been much better off for doing so. For one, blogs provide the ability to show the outside world the true ‘personality’ of a corporation. They also provide customers with another avenue through which to provide feedback, both good and bad.

Having gone through the setup and rollout of a corporate blog or two as part of my day-job, here are a few things to consider.

There is no ‘delete’ button on the Internet

While we all love Google, search engines that ‘crawl’ the Internet and index pages make it so that anything posted to a website (including blog content) is captured forever. If you’re tempted to post inflammatory or controversial comments or share political views on a blog, just remember that once you hit the publish button, you can’t take the postings back. Think about future employers, employees and even personal relationships before you post. For a fun aside that highlights what I’m talking about, check out the ‘Wayback Machine‘ (aka the Internet Archive) where you can type in a URL, even of now-defunct companies, and view old websites in all their glory.

Blogging anonymously is not the answer

Earlier this spring, the Electronic Frontier Foundation came out with an interesting bit on anonymous blogging. For me, the takeaway here is that blogging anonymously is much easier said than done. Your writing style and details that come through in postings can be used to identify you. Not only that, but it is extremely difficult to post compelling content while trying to keep things vague and innocuous. Besides, if the reason you’re blogging in the first place is to bash a company, product or person, you should be confident enough to stand by what you’re saying and put your name on it.

Something for corporations to worry about is how to handle the situation when disgruntled employees decide to setup an anonymous blog and share confidential information or blast fellow employees. This is where issues of free speech, libel, etc. come in to play and legal teams and HR departments have to get involved.

What do you mean no comment?!?

I know a lot of people will differ with me on this point, but a blog without comments is not a blog, it’s a website. The whole point of a blog is to engage in conversation, that’s why there are Comments, TrackBacks and the like.

I’m fine with corporations deciding to reserve the right (but they must clearly spell out the rules) to remove comments if they’re deemed to be inflammatory, off-topic or such. This has become especially true with the rise of ‘Comment Spam,’ which is an unfortunate, yet inevitable outcome of the blogging phenomenon.

As we got set to rollout our corporate blog, Bitemarks, the comments policy was a heated topic of conversation. While far from perfect, our policy is simple and has served its purpose thus far.

PR pros: is it OK to post about a client? What about a potential client?

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but it turns out that it’s a bit more nuanced than it appears. First off, before you post about a client you should be sure they’re comfortable with you doing so. You wouldn’t want to drag a client into something they’re not ready to get involved with-and many clients, particularly non-tech clients, might have to be convinced that blogging is of value. Also, blatant attempts to promote a client via a PR blog will likely not result in success. Your client probably already has a website, so save the product or company promotion for that. If you are going to post, keep it about issues, larger trends and be informative. The beauty of blogging is its self-selecting nature-just because you write it, doesn’t mean anyone will read it, or care.

Things get particularly interesting when a PR practitioner comments on a company that is not a client. Depending on the particular circumstance, the company could potentially be a client at some point in the future. Again, the same rules apply-as long as postings are legitimate, build on the story and the person making the post is willing to stand by their statements, everything should be fine.

Whose blog is it anyway?

Another consideration when getting set to rollout a corporate blog is properly identifying contributors. Will it be a CEO blog, or a group blog? If it’s a group blog, who will be authorized to contribute? Either way, be sure to identify a person or people who will be able to devote both time and energy to contribute regular, well-thought out posts. Blogging takes time.

For our group blog, we’ve identified a regular set of contributors who have committed to a specific number of postings per month. This helps keep the content fresh and ensures that no one is expected to single-handedly run the show.

Separation of company and contributor

This one remains a grey area. Many blogs, ours included, run the disclaimer that any opinions expressed in the comments section are those of their authors and not necessarily the company’s. This seems straightforward.

Where things get blurry is when an employee sets up a personal blog, identifies the company he/she works for, and begins posting away. Is this person now ’speaking’ on behalf of the company they work for? The policy that seems to winning favor in this instance is requiring employees to explicitly state that opinions expressed on a personal blog are their own, not those of the company they work for.

What does it all mean?

As I mentioned, several companies have done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of developing policies that address blogging. For some great examples, check out what Plaxo (full disclosure, a client), Sun (full disclosure, a client) and IBM (full disclosure, not a client) have come up with.

At the highest-level, blogs shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other form of electronic communication (i.e. email, instant messaging, online discussion forums). The bottom line is that blogs are here to stay, so company leaders and heads of corporate communications need to ensure that employees are very clear about what is and isn’t allowed.

It will be interesting to see how blog policies evolve over the next year-hopefully PR Blog Week 3.0 will have an update for us then.

About the author

Trevor Jonas is an account manager at Bite Communications in San Francisco. When not helping sell stories on behalf of his clients, he can be found posting on the Bite blog, watching and/or playing sports and traveling.