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Would you trust your newest employee to represent your company, interact with the media, even chat informally with your biggest customers? If your newest employee is young, hip, technologically literate and comfortable communicating over blogs, message boards or social networking sites, it may be happening already. IT groups need to step up and get a handle on these and other new communication mechanisms ... before statements made there come back and bite your company's bottom line.
We're not saying to put a lid on. This genie is out of the bottle, and imposing a Draconian usage policy will do more harm than good. Disseminating your company's message solely using print and TV ads limits your audience. By 2008, 80 percent of Global 1,000 companies will have experimented with new-media concepts, but fewer than 20 percent will have successfully adopted a wide range of these technologies, according to Gartner. That's unfortunate: Try to find a college student who doesn't use MySpace or FaceBook. This is a golden opportunity for smart IT groups to help their companies beat the pack.
Take The Lead
The organic growth of new media reminds us of how PDAs and IM came into the enterprise--from the bottom up. IT can show leadership in education and policy building, security and content filtering, and knowledge management to help harness the ideas housed in nonconventional media like blogs and Wikis.
IT groups are well-equipped to make recommendations on what level of new media usage is acceptable, because they're likely longtime consumers: Our poll for this article garnered responses from 699 readers, nearly half from companies with revenue between $100 million and $1 billion. Fully 70 percent read tech blogs, while 40 percent listen to tech podcasts and 51 percent read wikis.
In addition, tech companies blazed the trail for new media. Jeff Sandquist, a leading Microsoft blogger, reminded us that Microsoft engineers were engaging in dialog with customers and partners through CompuServe forums and Usenet groups a decade ago. Sure, we all got a chuckle over the Microsoft contractor fired for posting on his blog photos of Apple G5s being unloaded at the Redmond campus. But that was an isolated incident; there are more than 3,000 MSDN bloggers today, yet Sandquist says there is no approval process for blog posts.
Sandquist runs Channel 9, a video blogging site aimed at Microsoft developers; the name comes from United Airlines' audio Channel 9, where passengers can listen to the pilot's communication channel.
"When a [software release] schedule changes, that's like the plane rearing right really quickly. If we're not transparent and open with them about where we're heading, they're like 600 people in a tube going hundreds of miles of hour, and we have their livelihood," says Sandquist, explaining Channel 9. "The ultimate dream is, listen to the cockpit and help us fly the plane."
What is that goodwill worth to Redmond? Quite a lot it seems. Channel 9 had about 3.5 million unique visitors in June.
The takeaway? Hallmarks of new media are democracy and transparency: Is your corporate culture such that employees at different levels could have a frank discussion about a controversial new product on an internal message board without fear of reprisal? Could an engineer freely discuss a known product issue with a customer on an outward-facing help forum?
The success of any new-media initiative depends on building communities of producers and consumers. To generate producers, employees must feel safe stepping up and speaking up. IT should work with the business side to understand your company's level of openness and build appropriate policies for inward- and outward-facing communications.
Ground Rules
We were shocked to see that 85 percent of respondents to our reader poll said their companies' policies don't cover blogging. A statement an employee makes could expose your company to bad press, even a defamation lawsuit, so corporate council, HR and business leaders should help build a policy covering external and internal communications. This task isn't as daunting as you'd think: Your employee handbook probably forbids the discussion of financial information, unannounced products, pending litigation and so forth.
"We've always had a set of company policies about what you're allowed to say," says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and one of the architects of Sun's blog policy. "The only thing that's really qualitatively new is the permission to go ahead and say anything at all."
Sun publicly discloses its blog policy--which is well worth reading. "If you look at our policy, at least half of it is pointers on good blogging practice and how to succeed doing it," Bray says. IBM also posts its policy. IBM developed its blog policy by first soliciting employee input through an internal wiki.
In our reader poll for this article, of the 170 respondents who said they do have personal blogs, about one in four said they discuss work. Although the First Amendment generally protects that right, most employers also have the right to send bloggers to the unemployment line for public or private comments. And a number of employers have shown a willingness to do just that: Microsoft, Delta Airlines, a U.S. senator, Friendster and Google have all fired employees over postings made on personal blogs.
Lawsuits over these firings have generally favored the employer. Still, crafting a policy on personal blogging just makes sense: Fired bloggers have a tendency to generate headlines.
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