Flashes of Panic

I’ve listed these in decreasing order of importance, and it’s important to add that I don’t give a damn if anyone speaks HTML/CSS/XML or Hindi. You don’t need to know the difference between Movable Type and Wordpress.

You need to know that it is damned easy for anyone to say anything they like about your company. You need to know that your employees will talk about work, and instead of talking about it in the bar at happy hour, they’re going to talk about it on a blog with dozens or hundreds of readers. You need to know that just as you can’t walk down to the bar and put a towel in your employee’s mouth when they gripe about their latest task, you can’t micromanage every weblog post they ever make that references their work.

You need to have a clear policy about weblogs, and that policy probably shouldn’t be, “Don’t blog about work.” Unless you’re the CIA, that’s neither a practical nor a reasonable request. Your employees are grownups, and if you treat them as such, they’ll return respect for your company.

Restricting what your employees can say on their own sites, on their own time, doesn’t protect your image. It hauls up the bright orange flag that says, “We Don’t Get It.” There are dozens of reasonable and sensible corporate blogging policies out there. Find one. Copy it.

Why do so many companies react with fear when they see the power of weblogs to disseminate and concentrate public opinion? Do they have something to be afraid of? If that’s the way you’re reacting to employee weblogs, you really do have a problem. Weblogs build trust. I trust Yahoo! about thirty times more now than I did two years ago when I started reading Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. That’s not because Yahoo! has brainwashed Jeremy and made him say nothing but good things about them; it’s because Yahoo! has given Jeremy the tools and challenges to make him a happy employee, and they’ve recognized that the trust he’s built with his readers is good for them because it gives a massive company a human face.

If you’re scared of your employees’ blogs, perhaps you need to take a few minutes to think about how you can build trust with your potential clients/customers/readers/subscribers. You need to show a human face and a name, not just a logo. All that stuff about brand identity? It will bite you in the butt if people start associating your brand with opacity, non-communication, or simple heavy-handedness. (And you can forget that marketing cat litter about “lovemarks,” by the way.)

You can’t control every word that’s ever published relating to your organization. Stop trying. Start telling your own story. Tell it so people will trust you. Even let other people tell it, and don’t censor them. Make it easy for people to follow your story, by giving them a feed they can watch in fifteen different ways.

If you don’t have a story people can trust, well… I do know at least one closed society which is still relatively intact, so I guess it’s possible.

Oh, and one more thing: don’t ask me for advice if you don’t trust what your employees are saying, for pity’s sake. If you can’t understand the people who are actually engaged, you’ve got problems I can’t solve.

Now Playing: Satellite from Cherry Marmalade by Kay Hanley