Corporations and the blogosphere
I ran across a post at HRM Direct about Joel’s run-in with Monster, and while I think the point about educating one’s employees about how to engage with bloggers is a good one, I think there’s a larger-picture issue here.
At most companies, especially large ones, the written policy is that employees are not to comment publically about the company, and that only corporate PR and the execs may do that. If there’s not a written policy, there’s still a strong sense that making written public statements about your employer is a good way to get yourself fired. Corporations want message management, brand control, a unified face. As a result, they tend not to trust every employee at every level of the company to speak for them.
I contend that it is policies like this which are actually the root of experiences like the one Joel had with the anonymous troll from Monster. Would better employee education about how to engage bloggers have resulted in a better response to Joel’s post? Almost certainly. But the reason such training doesn’t happen is because companies don’t want their employees speaking for them in public, much less on the Internet.
So instead, employees who don’t like what they read about their employer try what the Monster troll did- they post anonymously, and since they always seem to forget that their IP address is being logged, they get caught, and outed, resulting in an even worse public image incident.
In order to prevent that from happening, companies are going to have to completely re-think their policies about public commentary. The blogosphere demands openness, transparency, and authenticity. Traditional corporate PR requires control, consistency, and a single voice. As a result, corporate PR departments who still take the traditional approach generally have no idea how to deal with blogs- it’s not that they approve of anonymous sock puppetry by their employees, it’s that encouraging their employees to do it the right way would require them to rethink their entire approach to PR and brand management, and they aren’t prepared for it.
So instead, they ignore the problem and hope it goes away, except of course it doesn’t, because- and here’s the thing they can’t figure out how to control, because they can’t- their employees have opinions. And when everyone else gets to express them on the Internet, the employees wonder, why can’t they?
And to a certain extent, I don’t blame the companies- when you’ve got thousands of employees, at least some of them are likely to be disgruntled for no good reason, or unaware of what kind of information about the company is confidential. Reducing the number of people who can comment publically about the company is one way to manage that kind of uncertainty.
A lot of people will just demand total transparency as the only answer. But that’s not a workable solution. Sure, corporate PR would certainly do well to add a lot more transparency and authenticity, but there are some things that just can’t be talked about. Financials, trade secrets, future plans, etc. And you can’t trust every employee from the CEO to the mailroom to know which category each bit of information falls into. Employee education is a good start to helping employees distinguish confidential information, but it’s not failsafe, and often the entire future of a company (and the jobs of its employees) rests on certain information being kept confidential.
So I don’t know what a workable, practical solution to all of this is. Certainly, companies should take the hint and be more transparent in their dealings with the public. And it’s a great idea for companies to start looking at their rank-and-file employees as potential ambassadors, rather than liabilities who have to be kept quiet. But I don’t know what the practical limit of that is- it’s probably different for every company.
I also don’t know why I insist on beginning all my sentences with conjunctions. But that’s a rant for another blog on another day.
October 3rd, 2006 at 8:52 am
A friend of mine sent me an article that noted that blogging is as essential to our generation as the telephone was to the previous generation. There’s so much truth to that. I appreciate my current company because their attitude is that they know we’re going to do it and they’re going to read it so use sound judgment and we will never have to talk about it.
That said, I don’t know what it’s like to work at a huge company with internationally sought trade secrets. I don’t know how I as a blogger would have survived at HP when Carly Fiorina was ousted because I would have wanted to use “blog as soapbox” to invite commentary.
The Web is just the “Broadcast News” of our genre — we’re mad as hell, we’re not gonna take it anymore and we’re gonna preserve it for posterity and make sure the world (and not just the local network affiliate) knows that we were affected by something and maybe, in that, we could effect some change for the better.
Blah blah blah. Point is, a little trust could go a long way in generating a lot of loyalty. Full transparency is impossible, yet a simple, “Here’s the CliffsNotes version; can we count on you for your discretion and loyalty?” might — *gasp* — work if someone tried it!
October 4th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
But just like people think that no one’s listening to them talk about company confidential information at the airport (they are), a lot of people think that no one but their friends are reading their live journal (leak company sensitve information and they are). Too many people think that because they didn’t publicize a link that other people won’t find it (you’d be surprised). The airport thing was something that IBM went over constantly. You never know who else is on your flight. You never know who else the client is hearing pitches from. Don’t give away the business by talking too much in the wrong place. (On the plus side, we were also instructed to stop others from doing that by identifying ourselves as their competition should the need arise.)
Perhaps a policy - you have opinions about things. Your home computer is an excellent place from which to express them rather than resources we pay for or whatever seems appropriate. But yes, saying nothing and then having to deal with the fallout seems far worse than thinking it through ahead of time.