Corporate RSS publishing has proven invaluable for those organizations who blog internally. It has streamlined communication, been of great value in collaborative efforts, and greatly decimated the dreaded daily deluge of email.

Corporate Blogging Needs a Blog Leader

When a corporation adopts external blog marketing in addition to internal blogging, it is strongly recommended that the corporate blogging department coordinate all of these efforts with IT, who, after implementing a content management system does not want the additional responsibility of being a corporate blog cop as well.

Sandra Gittlen in ComputerWorld describes the organizational model that California’s Saugus Union School District is creating in establishing responsibilities around the areas of defamation and liabilities across all of their social networking efforts.

“…Klein, who is director of information services and technology, didn’t want IT to become the blog police. To avoid that, he put controls in place so that both IT and the school district are protected from users running amok. “The way we handle it is that if a business unit wants to start blogging, then a leader has to manage those blogs,” he says.
[..]
Another key element is that leaders and users must be clear about community expectations.
[..]
Klein researched his district’s rules of conduct, as well as state and federal guidelines and IBM’s blogging policy, before developing an acceptable-use policy. It covers text, video and other multimedia materials”
(source)

Data from a recent press release from security specialists Proofpoint, quoted below, emphasizes the need for corporations that seriously intend to embrace social networking to establish a dedicated department headed by a “blog leader” who has prepared for all contingencies.

Corporate Blogging Concerns

• In the past 12 months, 21.4% of companies surveyed had investigated the exposure of sensitive information via blog or message board postings, while 19.2% disciplined and 9.1% terminated employees for such infractions.
• In the past 12 months, 12.4% of publicly traded companies surveyed had investigated the exposure of material information via blog or message board postings.
• 48.7% of companies are very concerned or concerned about Web-based email as a conduit for exposure of confidential or proprietary information. Respondents are also very concerned about FTP, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networks, media sharing sites, blogs and message boards as potential conduits for data loss.

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: acceptable_use_policy, Blog Marketing, content_management_system, defamation, networking_efforts, organizational_model, RSS-publishing, social_networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under Business Blogging, Corporate RSS Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.