December 2006
Blogging Employees
Where do corporate policies start and free speech stop?
By Lori Valyko Weber

Michael Gonzalez is researching the phenomenon of blogging and online social forums like MySpace as a member of a special interest group for the North East Ohio Software Association. He is marketing manager at Mentor-based Med-XS Solutions. Photo by Marc Golub

Suppose you work at a conservative company, perhaps in the insurance industry. You do good work. You have your navy suits faithfully dry cleaned. You eat healthy tuna salad lunches that you make yourself. You get your hair cut neatly every six weeks and you’ve won the punctuality award in your department for the last three months. You get along with your coworkers, and your boss respects your job performance.

This situation has happened, and it’s cost some people their jobs. Most bloggers we spoke with are anonymous, using fake names to create images of people they want to project to their online viewers.

But some, like Heather Armstrong, a blogger in Salt Lake City who had been working as a Web designer in Los Angeles, got canned in 2001 when her employer discovered she had been posting stories about her coworkers online.

That firing made her famous, and she coined the term “dooce” to refer to employee dismissals resulting from employers taking offense at their employees’ blogs. Today, her blog www.dooce.com gets more than 49,000 hits per day. She supports herself entirely on advertising sales, with customers including Hoover, Vonage, Ameriprise Financial and Federated Media (FM).

Whose space?

This territory is largely uncharted, dicey and disconcerting to many people. Most bloggers in Northeast Ohio would prefer to not discuss the subject, especially if they like either their jobs or the security their jobs provide. And employers who thought they knew their workers are sometimes finding out far more about their employees than they would care to know. Of the five bloggers we spoke with, only one uses his real name. He also doesn’t have a boss to worry about.

Will Kessel, a freelance Web designer and programmer in Euclid, hosts collisionbend.com. He’s been blogging for about three years, and during the time he held a full-time position at Optiem in Cleveland as a Web developer, he realized problems could arise if there were a conflict between what he posted on his personal Web site and his company’s image.

Owned by Adcom, Optiem entrusted Kessel to develop a company wide policy that addressed employee blogging. Kessel left Optiem to pursue freelance opportunities, and says his blog had nothing to do with his decision to leave the company. Today, collisionbend.com gets about 17,000 hits each month, and Kessel is hoping to garner advertising to support the site.

“When I started my blog, I knew I didn’t want to go afoul of what the company considered appropriate,” Kessel says. “I went to the president and told him I wanted to blog, and I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t write. From that conversation, I was asked to draw up the guidelines that defined what was expected of bloggers who were employees.”

Kessel says Adcom and Optiem were in the process of formally adopting his recommendations when he stepped down. His guidelines included things such as not discussing anything about clients and not bringing up any proprietary information or corporate secrets.

“Bloggers should use common sense when deciding what to post,” he says. “Don’t say anything about your coworkers, especially without their permission. And beyond that, you have to carry a certain professional decorum. You can’t have compromising photos or videos of yourself, or be libelous or slanderous. These things will get you in trouble.”

Kessel suggests that all companies draft a corporate blogging policy to avoid legal disputes should an employer decide to terminate an employee’s service after reading questionable blogged material.

“Define up front what’s appropriate and what’s not,” he says. “This helps both the company as well as the blogger. If it’s in writing and everyone knows the rules, it’s easier to establish if there’s been a violation.”

Even online social forums like myspace.com can open the door for potential conflicts at the office. One MySpace user who spoke on the condition of anonymity says she will never reveal her real name online, nor allow anyone at work to know her MySpace pseudonym.

“Yes, I feel like I’m living a double life,” she says. “I just have so much fun getting to know people from all over the country; I don’t want to give that up. But I know the people at work wouldn’t approve of some of the stuff I post. And I’ll never mention my employer in MySpace. Never.”

Michael Gonzalez is marketing manager at Mentor-based Med-XS Solutions, a medical equipment sales and service company that employs about 65 people. Gonzalez is in a special interest group for the North East Ohio Software Association (NEOSA) that is researching online social forums, especially blogging.

“You just can’t control it,” he says, adding that Med-XS Solutions doesn’t have a formal blogging policy in place. Nonetheless, Gonzalez is aware of the appeal of the blogging medium, as well as its reach.

“There have been missteps with blogs, both personal as well as professional,” he said. “And things that seem harmless can sneak up on you. Even to simply say that ‘I work at such-and-such company’ can come back and get you in trouble in the future.”

Gonzalez says he once found via a search engine a former employee who had a MySpace account. At the time, she was working for Med-XS Solutions, and didn’t post anything objectionable. All she said was that she worked for the company. There were no problems, and the worker eventually left the company.

Keeping tabs on workers’ online lives is a job Gonzalez says he’d rather live without. The sheer number of blogs (a recent online search showed that there are more than 40 million active ones) makes it virtually impossible to track accurately or consistently. Besides, Gonzalez has his day-to-day tasks to take care of.

“I can’t spend all day at my computer seeing who’s writing about the company on MySpace or on their blogs,” he says. “Some people use blogs, even the professional ones, as a place to vent and get mad about things. OK. Maybe that’s this person’s best tool, but just because someone posts something online, professionally or socially, doesn’t always mean it’s credible. NEOSA is seeing a lot of both advantages and pitfalls in blogs. You need to ask yourself about the source and why this person is writing it. There are some very good online forums out there, but there is also junk.”

Gonzalez likens the blogging phenomenon to the early days of e-mail, noting that even today many companies don’t have formal e-mail procedures in place.

"And look how much miscommunication happens with e-mail,” he said. “Someone can easily misconstrue the tone of an e-mail message and generate a meaning he didn’t intend. And the Internet’s speed and efficiency make communication – either via Web site, blog or e-mail – instantaneous. It’s gotten to the point where e-mail replies are expected instantly and not personally. Everything is ‘hurry up.’ And it’s easy to forget we’re dealing with human beings.”

For companies considering hosting corporate blogs, Gonzalez urges that posters have something worthy to say, and that it’s able to be updated frequently. Med XS Solutions doesn’t blog professionally because its main customers are hospital CFOs, who Gonzalez doesn’t think have the time or inclination to sit around and read blogs, no matter how well written they may be.

"Yes, the potential is there for legitimate business use, but you have to ask yourself, do I have something to say and continually add to it every day or every week,” he says. “If you’re a huge company, it’s easier to manage, and you’ll be building off of an already established brand. But if you’re a more transactional company, then you’ll have to take a hard look at why you want to get involved in a blog.”

Lori Valyko Weber is a Hambden Township freelance writer.