Comments on: Blogs should not be ’subject to management approval’

By: Terry Dontje

Terry Dontje — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 13:47:16 +0000

Too funny, I think I didn’t read your article carefully enough. It really didn’t sink in that they were going to hire a particular individual to write a blog. Kind of like a Blogging Czar, this seems rather silly to me. I think they’d be better served having their customer liason’s blog. However, I imagine that might be outsourced to people who only take orders (therefore little concern about the company) so maybe that is a bad idea.

Anyways, it seems to me that even with a free roaming Blog Czar they’d still end up with a paid commercial blog. I guess that’s ok, just that I doubt I would visit it. Not sure if the product was something like beer if I would visit it either (hmmm, does Guinness have blog).

–td

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:40:05 +0000

my belief is that the employees will probably not want to deal with getting approvals and the fact that initially Mr Goodman may run into a lot of items to approve

True Terry, it will depend on who they take on to blog - if it is someone who is confident enough, they may be able to convince Mr Goodman that he is harming their blog (and by extension the company) rather than helping through his restrictions.

By: Terry Dontje

Terry Dontje — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:37:51 +0000

I kind of agree and kind of not agree with you. I think with technology companies that allow blogs (like Sun, Microsoft, IBM,…) all have rough guidelines one must follow. A lot of the guidelines (at least Sun’s) are pretty common sense but it helps guide employees from generally making bad moves. Point here, is there have been considerations and some amount of mitigation done to prevent (reduce?) legal actions.

I also think technology companies that have been working electronically already have the understanding that people speaking over the phone is very similar to speaking electronically. That is the progression of email vs. phone to usenet vs email to blogs vs usenet is probably a lot smaller granularity to deal with and understand than blogs vs phone. Bottom line there really isn’t a difference (except size of broadcast) of a support person communicating with a customer on the phone versus posting something on a blog. Whereas Mr Goodman is probably looking at blogs more like a newspaper media.

So the question I would have for Mr Goodman is whether he has to approve every conversation that each customer rep has with customers? I assume the answer is no and then the question morphs into why he believes blogs are that much different.

In the end I agree with you that the company will probably not do well with their blogs. However, my belief is that the employees will probably not want to deal with getting approvals and the fact that initially Mr Goodman may run into a lot of items to approve.

Wow, I didn’t really plan on making such a long response.

–td