Corporate Threats to bloggers

I read today about two separate and unrelated threats to bloggers from large corporates.

One, Forrester, has been dissected at length in public.  They decided not to let employees blog about their work except on the Forrester.com domain, partly it seems because they’ve been stung by former staffers becoming ‘famous’ online and having built a strong personal brand, then leaving to work somewhere more lucrative.

The other, is the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Here’s a personal experience of the Olympic movement and elite sport with regard to blogging.

I run Rowperfect UK, and we signed up some athletes to blog for us and got one of their blogs streamed onto the UK Guardian newspaper’s website.

The UK Rowing organisation (British Rowing) refused to allow one athlete’s work to be published alongside any advertising on the newspaper site. The Guardian were charming and re-wrote the code around his words to exclude any advertising so as not to compromise the British Rowing team’s sponsorship agreements.

Thanks to Dave Churbuck for alerting me to this story. and Newsy.com for a video pov.

What does this mean for my company?

Blogging is a way of creating opportunities for your business development.  Each company should think carefully about what blogging and other social media activity it is prepared to allow, and what is beyond the boundary.

What are your blogging guidelines?

I used to point clients to the Sun website where their guidelines were among the best…. but it’s now subsumed into Oracle.

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