The Difference Between Water Cooler Conversations and Blogs

Whether an employee blogs on a corporate sponsored site or on their own blog, both they and their company are entering potentially risky waters. NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday did a program on Corporate Blogging that explored some of the legal and ethical issues of corporate blogs and employee blogs as well as the potential ramifications.

Host Neal Conan interviewed guests John Palfrey, director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Michael Wiley, director of New Media for General Motors and Mark Jen, a former Google employee who was fired for what he said about the company in his blog. Palfrey pointed out that bloggers are not protected by “free speech rights” such as the first amendment in any special way. Palfrey’s quick advice was that “what is unlawful offline is also unlawful online”.

However, if you say the wrong thing at a water cooler you may get away with it given that your audience is likely to be very small and probably won’t include the people you are complaining about. But, disclose company information inappropriately on a blog or even commenting negatively about your job and you may be putting that very job at risk. The primary difference between the water cooler conversation and a blog post is about distribution. The potential impact of a blogger’s statement could have both immediate and long-term impact on the company’s reputation far greater than a water cooler conversation. Palfrey pointed out that with the archiving capabilities of Google and other archive sites as well as the rapid distribution of RSS feeds, off-the-cuff employee comments can have long lasting impact on a company and its reputation.  Even if an employee says good things about their company or its products, they could be disclosing information unfairly, resulting in a RegFD violation.

Sun decided to trust in the intelligence and insight of their employees to discern where to draw the line on what to say about the company, it’s strategy and it’s products, hosting over 1000 employee blogs. GM has decided to constrain employee blogs to a handful of carefully executed blogs, most notably, the GM FastLane blog, whose primary author is GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.  In both cases, the companies are receiving high accolades for their approaches to corporate blogging and engagement with bloggers. In the promo for this piece, NPR points out that, ‘blogging is a favorite pastime for many tech-savvy writers’. While that is true, the blogging audience goes far beyond tech-savvy people. Blogging is easy. It requires no special technical skills to get started. Anyone can create their own blog or post comments to a blog quickly and for free using services such as Typepad. The low barrier to entry has enabled millions of consumer-savvy bloggers to participate in online discussions. That also means that any employee could be a blogger even if their company doesn’t provide hosting services or corporate blogging guidelines.

GM realized that blogging already goes far beyond the tech community reaching almost every demographic and geographic community, even those that have never expressed an interest in GM vehicles. The opportunity to connect with existing customers and potential customers, tech-savvy or not, proponents or critics, is so immense that both GM and Sun are making a bet that the benefits of corporate blogging far outweigh the risks. But the risks are real and not to be taken lightly.

Disclosure: John Palfrey is an advisor to Cymfony as well as a contributor to this blog.