No Easy Answers As Blogs Enter The Biz World

04/21/2005

Dana VanDen Heuvel, the meister blogger, poses an important question. In a recent post he asks, "Who's thinking of the corporate governance of weblogs?"  Within a boutique business or a one person shop, it's not too complicated to ensure that confidential strategies stay in-house.

What happenes when corporations add blogging responsibiities to a job description? How does the business world walk the fine line of keeping the spirit of blogging alive with quality control or (gasp) post monitoring peaking behind the virtual corner?

Seems to me this soon could be questions that keep managers up at night.

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There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the need for transparency in business blogging. I'm not sure what transparency means. If transparency means complete and open communications, without guidelines, limits, or controls on blogging about the inter-working or a corporation – I’m against it. The risks are too great.

By risk I mean: How will trade secrets and intellectual property be protected? What is the exposure to investors and shareholders – especially regarding Sarbanes-Oxley and earning expectations? Are there any legal obligations or risk as a result of real-time and open communications? Are there any product liability issues? What are the safeguards to assure competitive positions are not weakened? How will intellectual property be protected and advanced? Etc.

I believe risk management is the greatest issue to address in business blogging. For some reason it gets little time in discussion as compared to the drum beating on the necessity to blog and use of RSS. To me, the cart is in front of the horse on the issue of business blogging.

Posted by: Jim Logan on Apr 21, 2005 10:14:49 AM

Frederik over at CorporateBlogging Blog (http://www.corporateblogging.info/) posted today that the pending Adobe acquisition of Macromedia has had an effect on the Macromedia bloggers for just this reason.

Coming from a corporate marketing background (although now I am a free-spirited consultant) this was an issue that grabbed my interest when I first started blogging and I have blogged about it a little bit.Why hasn't it received more attention. Not nearly as sexy as some of the other issues that have grabbed the blogosphere's attention of late. Too corporate...

I think I'll look at it again. I need a new topic :-)

Posted by: Susan Getgood on Apr 21, 2005 3:06:20 PM

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