Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

[At BloggerCon, Day 2]

After the World's (intentionally) Worst Introduction by Ed Cone, Halley talks about a hypothetical case study she wrote for The Harvard Business Review about an employee, "GloveGirl," who has a great blog about her company that on occasion blurts out uncomfortable truths (and perhaps an occasional error). The company doesn't know what to do with her.

I was one of the "expert commentators" (hah!) in the article, and I wrote that the problem is mainly one of metadata: it needs to be clear on her site that she's not writing for the company. Phil Wolff takes a harder line: she's an employee and should not be allowed to disclose information about the company and is at risk of creating a hostile environment by talking about her love life.

Jon Udell says that blogging is more like collaboration than like a performance, and so GloveGirl ought to be encouraged because she's extending collaboration to the customers. The line, he says, is necessarily fuzzy. Ed adds that this is what the Dean campaign is doing: the comments are the bloggers, and you just have to put up with the ones who are jerks.

Halley asks what the perfect tool would be for corporate blogging, allowing you to make some posts private to particular groups. Someone recommends LiveJournal. Open Text Livelink has (or is about to have) blogs as part of their corporate intranet collaborative suite, and SocialText also is headed towards corporate, in-house blogging groups. (Disclosure: I was a VP at Open Text and am on the BoA of SocialText. And I'm keynoting the Open Text user conference.)

Phil is looking for a lawyer to write up a model of an employment agreement that covers blogging. Interesting.

Halley says she's working on a piece caled "How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sales Force in Ten Easy Steps."

Good, lively session.