The Boss(es Boss) is Blogging!

Hurrah, welcome to the blogosphere Miki Szikszai!

We’ve been discussing internal communications within our team for some time now, and recently had an offsite at which our profile was hotly debated. Blogging was one of the ways we identified we could raise our profiles internally and (where appropriate) externally.

So, at some stage last week, Miki set himself up on blogspot and you can visit his blog here (it’ll also sit in my blogroll links). I see this as a positive move and hope that it might start the ball rolling to entice others higher up the tree to also start blogging too.

Now while some companies have embraced corporate blogging, others are (rightly) concerned about the privacy and legal issues that may arise from it. Is it worth the hassle? What do companies need to consider in the way of ground rules before approving such a strategy?

I guess the rules are different for each company depending on what kind of a target you are and what kind of compeditive threat you could be exposed to should one of your bloggers ‘say too much’. The last point is the most worrying for me, I’ve written a number of articles which I’ve yet to publish, simply because they refer to, or give insight on strategic work which I’m involved with and, to our competitors this would be a valuable heads up, or a huge time saver in that they could learn from our mistakes and prototyping results.

So what’s my call to action? I guess I’d like companies to see what the likes of Robert Scoble (now ex) Microsoft corporate blogger has done for the ‘human face’ of his company with his Scobleizer blog and the work he’s done with Channel 9. Blogging has been around for long enough to grow a community of authors and readers and the developments in blogging tools, (free) blog hosting and RSS readers allows us to lower the barriers for viewership and indeed participation. Everyone has an opinion and it doesn’t take too long to see whose opinions are worth reading and whose are simply mindless gibberings (albeit with infrequent flashes of inspiration).

Think about it, set some rules, constrain viewership to internal corporate IP addresses if you’re wanting to dip your toe in the water first, but let your employees have their say and open up those channels of communication – internally and externally.