The attitude in this book is best summed up by the old saying "damned if you do, damned if you don't." According to Nancy Flynn, organizations must blog to survive. Blogging is the way to get the word out on your product, service, whatever. If you don't blog you will lose contact with your customer base and die. But, blogging will inevitably lead you into trouble. Somebody will hack your site. An unhappy customer will leave a comment on your site and it will be linked to by 27 million bloggers and your name will be mud. A disgruntled employee will spill the beans and some government regulator will shut you down and the shareholders will sue you for a bizillion dollars.
Flynn's answer to the dilemma is that every company should blog, but that it should do so within a framework of extremely (possible excessively) restrictive rules and policies. Every blog post should be vetted by a blog director. Employees should be made aware that if they say the wrong thing on a blog, even if it's not a company-owned blog, they can be sacked. Customer comments must be carefully censored so as to give the appearance of an open exchange, but nothing really negative should be allowed through. The CEO should blog in order to convey the human side of corporate leadership, but only after every word is checked by the company's legal firm.
My reaction after reading this book is that I'd never want to blog for a corporation that followed Flynn's advice and that as I consumer, I'd never want to read a blog produced under those conditions--it would be boring.
Microsoft, oft criticized for being too controlling, offers a counter model. Microsoft community blogs are, to quote from the site,
"Web pages which are updated frequently, written from the point of view of an individual, written in an informal tone, and usually expose an RSS feed for syndication . . . These blogs will provide you insights and opinions about using Microsoft technologies and software." I'm sure nondisclosure clauses are in effect and that the same rules about insubordination would apply in the blogs as in the workplace. For many years one of Microsoft's most famous bloggers was Robert Scoble, whose blog was often openly critical of company policies and decisions. The discussion that his blog raised, often around customers' negative responses to Microsoft products, led to product improvement and customer loyalty. Bill Gates had the vision to see how giving up a little control could be good for business. Scoble himself became such a "brand name" that he quit Microsoft and now blogs full time. His blog is called Scobelizer: technogeek.
Flynn has also written "E-Mail Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for E-Mail and Digital Communication" (Nancy Flynn, Randolph Kahn). I think I will give that book a pass.
Technorati Tags: blogging, business, censorship, technology
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