Does your company let you “blog”?
By Heb Drill
Comedian Joan Rivers always asks, “Can we talk?” Saturday Night Live alumnus Mike Myers, as the character “Linda Richman,” advised, “Talk amongst yourselves.” The object was more open communication – that goes back a lot of years.
Now, according to a Business Week Magazine article, something labeled as “blogging” is getting “the boss' blessing.”
The article discloses how you can go to a Microsoft employee’s Web log, and view her daily world: an affinity for TV shows starring Richard Dean Anderson (“MacGyver” and “Stargate – SG1”) and, as a 26-year-old software design engineer in Redmond, WA, her posts concerning the product she's working on and its latest bugs.
Business Week adds: “There's also her day-in-the-life workplace diary, complete with a glossary decoding Microsoft [arcane stuff] and strategies for nabbing extra espresso coupons. Customers post replies. Ideas are swapped. Bonds are formed - and Bill Gates is happy.”
Can you dig it?
Time was corporate bosses and managers would go ballistic if they found their underlings speaking freely to the masses concerning company stuff - and on company time - without the `suits’ from PR hovering over them to stay `on message’.” There would have been a faster, and more targeted, response from the executive suite than from the U.S. military to the 911 attacks.
The magazine contends that in the past year employee “blogs” have multiplied across Corporate America as more companies say “go for it.”
As you would imagine, the practice began in the techie world, “when engineers and product developers at places such as Macromedia, Sun Microsystems, and Dell began posting first-draft free-for-alls of their own volition as a way of communicating with customers, each other, and the outside world.” It’s sort of a corporate extranet with no firewall.
There’s an estimated 2.7 million “bloggers” today, but experts predict the number will expand exponentially as “consumers demand information in a more unvarnished way.”
Business Week maintains that executives view employee “blogs as a way to transform a transaction with a faceless behemoth into a personal relationship with an employee.” How many of us desire a personal relationship with so many of today’s incompetent and unconcerned employees?
Microsoft chairman William H. Gates 3d is certain “corporate blogging is the next gold rush in communications.” Companies such as publisher Ziff-Davis set up internal blogs which “proved enormously helpful to teams by cutting e-mail. They let employees learn what was appropriate when blogging to the outside."
The practice is described as possibly “dangerous, representing a new legal netherworld. The more truthful they are, the more valuable blogs are to customers. It's likely only a matter of time before some workplace pundit spills a trade secret, unwittingly leaks a clandestine launch date, or takes a swipe at a CEO that turns into slander.”
How about some “blogs” from the oil companies on why gasoline prices really went up so much?