In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed four types of internal blogging strategies:
- Executive blogs
- Blogging by subject matter experts
- Facilitated blogging
- Spontaneous or ad hoc blogging
This post, the last in our series, discusses a fifth internal blogging strategy – bringing the public blogs of employees home.
Blogs in the Wild
People blog. Many of these people are employed. Some of them may be employed at your corporation. To some executives this is terrifying. To some lawyer-types, external blog content may be inappropriate or even actionable. One legitimate strategy for dealing with these external blogs is to repatriate them – bring them inside the corporation and limit concerns over liability and disclosure of corporate secrets.
Business Benefits of Blog Repatriation
If you can convince employees to bring their blogs within the firewall, your company receives s several significant benefits:
- You stop educating your competitors. With blogs inside your firewall, only your organization benefits from knowledgeable insights published by your employees.
- You can control and limit any brand or liability issues that might arise when disgruntled or well-meaning but less-than-competent employees start publishing blogs
- You significantly reduce the visibility of your best and brightest employees to head hunters, recruiters and competitors.
Authors
An effective social media monitoring plan may allow you to identify employees authoring external blogs, particularly if you tune it (or work with your provider) to tune it for this purpose.
Associated Risks
You can’t stop employees from writing public blogs. At most, you can limit the information they share about corporate activities and culture. In asking employees to bring their thoughts inside the firewall you face two risks:
- Leaving your most articulate, most internet-savvy employees with the impression that your firm simply doesn’t “get” the new world of user generated content. This is probably not going to help retain millennial employees.
- Employees may perceive the corporation as attempting to infringe on their right to free speech. Employees can easily react to a perception of the corporation as “big brother” by adopting pseudonyms. It may even drive the writers to more damaging observations.
Additional Thoughts
There is an alternative approach, one pursued by Microsoft and Dell. Identify effective external bloggers, then assign them responsibility for writing corporate external blogs. If you minimize the involvement of lawyers and the marketing team in the blog authoring process, this may allow you to gain some of the benefits of repatriation without the potential risks.