One of the best corporate blogging policy guidelines I’ve seen. Written in plain English with just the right tone; not too corporate, not too casual – it’s just the right. I guess that’s to be expected coming from a publishing company. Their goals are simple:
- To raise the visibility of our company,
- To make a contribution to our industry, and
- To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.
They also have established a Blog Oversight Committee, “a group of fellow-employee bloggers who are committed to promoting
blogging within our company and making sure that the Company’s
interests are served.” The BOC is there to evaluate new blogs to make sure they set the right tone and be there to provide direction if there is any doubt on what one can or cannot post on their blog. Their carrot and stick is inclusion into the corporate blog aggregator page which is equivalent to an endorsement.
If you would like to have us link to your blog, you must submit it to the BOC. Before doing so, you should design your blog and write at least one entry. Once you have done this, send an e-mail to Gave Wicks with a link to your blog. The BOC will then review your blog and notify you whether or not it meets the criteria.
The idea that one should dive in, set up the design and make their first post before submitting their blog for evaluation is a great idea too. Only those that are serious about blogging will get to this stage and by the time they have, they will have thought about their message and tone.
It is also interesting to note that Thomas Nelson views each blog as the employee’s creation and therefore does not endorse a specific blogging package nor do they allow employee’s to expense costs for the blog (they also allow employees to run advertising on their blogs to offset expenses). This gets back to something Andy Lark explained to me. Whether they blog about their company or not, make sure to own their blog and it’s content. Your thoughts and relationships in a blog develop outside the context of your corporate affiliation and his view is that your blog, being the embodiment of all this, should be portable and follow you from company to company. This is why Andy established a blog on TypePad even while he was an employee at Sun which makes their own blogging product.
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