Hi, I’m Cliff Ennico legal editor of SPTV.com and author of the best selling book, Small Business Survival Guide. So you’ve got a bunch of employees in your small business and all the sudden you are surfing the web and you find out that some of theses people have set-up blogs on their websites and they are talking about you. Interesting, what is a blog and what are some of the legal concerns you should have about blogging in general?
First of all, who don’t know a blog is a very informal, casual type of website. Short for web blog and some people like to think of it as sort of an online diary. It is a website but a very informal one. One in which I can post things to it fairly easily without having to use an IT person or anything. They are very personal and intimate in nature.
When I put up a blog, I am talking about Cliff Ennico and all the ways in which Cliff Ennico looks at the world. Now forgive me, I am a big believer in technology and I’m much bigger believer in freedom of expression of any kind. But when a lawyer looks at a blog, it is the perfect storm of legal problems. A blog from a strictly legal point of view combines all the worst features of email and a website.
A website because when you put something up on a blog it is up there for all the world to see in all of its embarrassing glory. Like an email because it is so easy to put 1:29 up through a blog that it is very easy to do something when you are afraid, when you are angry, or when you are just boneheaded stupid. It is very easy to make to put something up on a web blog in anger or when you are just not thinking and then you are going to live to regret it later.
I wish I had a dollar for every corporate employee who has been fired because of something inappropriate that they put up on their blog. The secretary who was fired from her job because she put up, had like a “Dilbert” type cartoon on her blog satirizing her co-workers and things that they were saying to each other in the work place. The airline flight attendant who put up suggestive photographs of herself in her uniform on her blog talking about all the exciting adventures she has had with people, people who flown the airline. The tech person who in a fit of enthusiasm for a new project that he was putting— he was working on for his company posted a prototype and a working diagram of the product on his blog which of course all the companies’ competitors immediately ripped off before the product was released.
There are a million ways to get in trouble with a blog. Should you encourage your employees to post blogs I think the answer is absolutely— if they are professionals and if you trust that they know what they are doing and they know their responsibilities to you as their employer? Why, because blogs are a great way for employees to communicate informally with clients, get people a picture of the company. A lot of companies use blogs as recruiting tools because people feel— a potential candidates for jobs feel more comfortable talking to employees on their blogs then going on the corporate side and accessing information.
There are a lot of positives to using blogs but you have to be very careful. If it were me, I would ask every new employee to notify you when they setup a blog. Make sure you they give you the blog address and have somebody in the office monitor this things looking for inappropriate content. So if you see something the just shouldn’t be there, you can catch it before too many people have a chance to look at it. That is one thing you can do.
Secondly, you should adopt a bloggers code of conduct. There is an effort among several blogging communities to create a master blogging code of conduct that anyone posting a blog would be subject to— if you go on the web and you search for blogger’s code of conduct in quotes you will probably get a copy of the most recent draft that’s been circulated on the web. Consider adopting it for your employees or at least making your employees aware that they have responsibilities when they are blogging.
And last but not least is make sure you are doing in a way that doesn’t create problems for your employees in terms freedom of expression. People do have the right to express themselves and they certainly have a right to talk about things on their blogs such as politics or whatever. Don’t over enforce your policy. Just because that one of your employee blogger disagrees with your political views, that is not a reason to shut the blog down or to fire the employee.
Make sure that any adverse actions that you take against employees because of their blogs are not based on their opinions, which are protected by the first amendment but because of something that will— that has some provable harm to you and your company. I am Cliff Ennico for SPTV.com.
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