Corporate Blog Strategies: Spontaneous Blogging

We’ve discussed blogging by executives, blogs authored by subject matter experts and 5 types of enterprise blogging, we look at the most ambitious internal blog strategy – spontaneous blogging by just about any employee.

When reviewing analysts’ comments on the attitude of millennial employees, you quickly encounter the view that this new generation of workers grew up with the internet. Blogging is just part of what they do; part of how they live. Frankly, we at non-linear creations remain to be convinced. Studies of user generated content on the public internet make it clear that more than 90% of internet users are lurkers – they read social media content but don’t contribute. One percent of users generate the vast majority of content. We’ll be surprised if this figure differs dramatically in the corporation.

But we could be wrong.

Certainly we know of organizations that are encouraging any employee – regardless of their level of expertise or ability to articulate a thought - to author a blog and publish it for consumption by other employees. This ambitious strategy relies on spontaneous participation by a broad range of employees.

Business Benefits

Broad participation by employees in a blogging strategy is perceived to deliver two significant benefits:

• Reinforce corporate culture
  Corporate culture is a delicate phenomenon. It is thought by some that encouraging expression of ideas and interests by a broad group of employees supports the emergence of a true, integrated corporate culture (as opposed to a mandated, top-down culture.)
• Make it easier to attract – and retain – millennial employees
  Giving new employees the tools they expect – including blogging – it is thought to be useful in attracting new employees. The ability to quickly locate employees with who share common interests – scuba diving, ping pong, wine tasting – through their blogs may help new employees integrate quickly into the corporate fabric.

Authors

Everyone. In its broadest articulation, this truly means all employees. Executives, programmers, janitors, program officers, assistants: everyone.

Risks Associated with Employee Blogging

A successful spontaneous blogging strategy faces three sources of risk:

• Dumbing Down the Conversation
  Not all employees are created equal. Not all ideas are good. In flooding the intranet with discussions by all employees, you risk burying the key corporate information that drives success.
• Reduced Employee Productivity
  Employee distraction is a secondary risk. While you might argue that the corporation profits when thought leaders set aside time to blog, it’s hard to see how everyone using corporate time to express their concerns and interests can improve corporate productivity.
• Slanderous, Offensive, Inappropriate or Otherwise Litigation-Provoking Blog Posts
  This is the big concern. Employee litigation is a very real risk. We don’t pretend to be lawyers, but it strikes us as a bad idea to do anything that might be interpreted as creating a hostile work environment. Sexist, inappropriate or angry comments in employee blog posts could be interpreted as contributing to a poisonous workplace and may open the door to litigation. Make sure that you’ve thought through clear policies on employee blogging, monitoring of employee blogs and enforcement of policies.

Additional Thoughts

You can probably tell by the tone of this blog that we’re not convinced everyone in a company should have a voice. We think the signal to noise ratio in the world is already way, way too low. We think corporations benefit from blog strategies that produce more signal and less noise.

But we won’t be surprised if we’re wrong. This whole web 2.0 inside the firewall experiment is evolving daily. There are no best practices. Everyone is making it up as they go. We’re interested in your thoughts.