This article at CNET, “Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?“, caught my eye. Large corporations definitely feel nervous about allowing all their employees to have a public voice, but I think it’s now something that must be allowed, and good common-sense management can be used to help avoid some of the risk of lawsuits such as the one mentioned in the article involving Cisco.

Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide – blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to.

More importantly, attempting to disallow employee blogging at all would push employees to do the very thing that Cisco is having to deal with: anonymous blogging. Employees who don’t understand nor agree with the corporate blogging policy will end up blogging anyway, under aliases.

Sun Microsystems’ 4,000+ employee blog is probably the gold standard for corporate-blessed blogging, but many other companies have effectively leveraged blogging and there are particularly well-known bloggers out there who are associated with major companies. Just a small sampling includes: (more…)