<![CDATA[The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, February 24, 2005:
…people get fired every day for blabbing about private company stuff, whether or not it’s in blogs. Earl Gilmore, the first tech client of my old ad agency (way back around the turn of the 80s) had an employee policy manual with two pages in it. Page 1 said “Rule #1: Use good judgement.” Page 2 said “Violate Rule #1 and you’re in deep shit.” So, when somebody drowns in shit for syndicating their own bad judgement, that’s not a black eye for blogging. It’s stupidity with an RSS feed.
This goes back to my exchange with Scoble last week about Mark Jen’s firing from Google and the meaning of being discrete. Doc goes on to say that “‘Corporate blogging’ is so ironic it’s nearly an oxymoron. Having a ‘a system in place to monitor what is being said’ seems more consistent with ending a conversation than with starting one.”
My point to Robert is that you can’t claim to be unbridled about your comments a la “personal blogging” when doing “corporate blogging,” as the latter is inevitably subject to self-censorship. The fact we have to append “corporate” to blogging to make these conditions clear underscores exactly little things have changed from the days when people working for a company didn’t speak at all.
Scoble wrote in comments here that “You can have an open and frank relationship without being stupid, can’t you?” In light of his urging bloggers to expose their various personal sentiments about private life, gay marriage, politics, and so forth, the cordoning off of criticism of corporate actions defines writing about work into a special category. In the old days, when messages traveled in envelopes with stamps, people asked that their letters be held private until the died, but still expressed their true feelings in those letters. Today, we actually censor ourselves publicly.
That’s not to say that being stupid isn’t possible or that it isn’t right to punish stupidity, but let’s not act like blogging about corporate life is some new form of transparency when it isn’t.]]>