Ed Yourdon on the top-down, command-and-control mindset behind many decisions on corporate blogging (and the things that go with it such as dumb, restrictive policy in other areas) and how the mindset is destructively wrong and will end up hurting the businesses that continue to think this way.
Fact of the matter is, if businesses aren’t allowing their smart people to blog from inside, they’ll blog from the outside anyway. They just won’t be blogging and associated with your brand.
Think on it for a moment… Would you rather your best minds blogged freely under a company banner, identifying their thought leadership with your company or blogged anyway, outside the company, out on their own and associating that same thought leadership with just themselves making them ripe targets for headhunters and open thinking companies who are only too ready to pick up the phone and make them an offer to jump ship? I don’t think it’s a difficult choice.
Companies like Sun, Adobe, IBM and other have proved that corporate blogging works. You don’t see rants. You don’t see displays of disloyalty. You don’t see secrets being divulged. Failure to trust your employees and treating them like small, stupid children is what breeds those issues. Trusting them to be grown-ups and giving them the opportunity to discuss their thoughts publicly breeds loyalty, passion and a desire to do great work.
Read it and weep if your business thinks this way. They will lose business and struggle to keep up as the thought leaders described jump ship to more open thinking employers.
Stowe Boyd of /Message also discusses the post. Read his thoughts too - he’s a smart guy.
[…] A few days ago, I posted some comments on employee interpretations of a company’s blogging policy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of acknowledgments and responses; see, for example, Stowe Boy’s blog postings here, and some others there, and anywhere, and nowhere. I thought I’d add a few additional thoughts, but realized I should first identify the target audience to whom the thoughts are being addressed. It could include such folks as the […]
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