IBM and Sun have each issued corporate blogging policies and it is interesting to compare the way the two documents address issues that every corporation faces.
Companies need to determine what to allow employees to disclose about the company in their blogs and what to prohibit. The key is to provide enough freedom to be able to demonstrate intellectual ability without giving away intellectual property. I find the language in the IBM policy more clear.
Says Sun “As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.”
Says IBM: “The core principles — written by IBM bloggers over a period of ten days using an internal wiki — are designed to guide IBMers as they figure out what they’re going to blog about so they don’t end up like certain notable ex-employees of certain notable other companies. … this isn’t a policy that IBM is imposing upon us — it is a committment that we all have entered into together.”
On disclosure issues, both are similar:
Sun:
Financial Rules: There are all sorts of laws about what we can and can’t say, business-wise. Talking about revenue, future product ship dates, roadmaps, or our share price is apt to get you, or the company, or both, into legal trouble.
IBM:
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information.
IBM and Sun build their blogging approach
B.L. Ochman compares IBM’s and Sun’s blogging policies. It is interesting to note how IBM developed their approach: The core principles — written by IBM bloggers over a period of ten days using an internal wiki — are d…
I used to be a blogger inside IBM. I worked as a consultant in Business Consulting Services (BCS) and, at least 12 months ago when I left, there were surprisingly few people in BCS who knew about blogging let alone had an internal blog. The IBM blogging community is primarily a technical one. There are many interesting things happening in BCS so I would love to see some IBM BCS bloggers.
At a time when most companies are still grappling to come to terms with employee blogging, it is good to see that IBM and Sun have come out with corporate policies (or at least guidelines) to govern blogging.
I think part of the issue is that for many large companies, the concept of employees expressing their opinions to outsiders is something they would rather pretend did not exist, and so it is difficult for them to accept a medium that allows precisely that!
PR Miscellany – August 10, 2005
I am having RSS-induced guilt. All this unread PR content… maybe I should just stop taking vacation…. Colin McKay points to a very interesting “Crisis Response and Communications Planning” manual prepared by the Department of Plant Agriculture at t…