-
1 year agoEncourage your people to blog!
In the age of Facebook and other social media outlets that are growing in usage by businesses looking to get our attention, some are really scared about allowing their employees a voice. Scoble offered some good advice on this post on Quora which addressed the misconception that employees of big companies cannot blog their opinions freely. There’s a difference between doing so freely, and doing so irresponsibly. Just to requote, here’s his lessons learnt for good blogging practices.
1. Don’t write ANYTHING you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow.
2. Understand your role in life. At Rackspace I’m not the CEO, so I don’t try to talk like the CEO. That said, I get around to places the CEO doesn’t, so if I have some advice for him, I’ll definitely post it.
3. Before you throw someone under the bus, put yourself in their shoes. I’ve thrown lots of people under the bus in my 10 years of blogging. Heck, just recently I told the CEO of GM that he should be fired. I posted that knowing that he just might know our CEO, which could cause us trouble. But, I put myself in his position and figured it was worth the risk to post that. It is something I’d say to his face, too. But, this is VERY risky in a public company, or, really, any company. If you ruin someone else’s reputation or product launch, for instance, expect blowback.
4. Know the law. You better know the law surrounding financial results, patents, and other things, before you really screw up royally. I once spent a weekend with a lawyer from Microsoft learning how they think and getting up to date on what pisses them off. That was invaluable.
5. Culture is NOT a line in the sand, it is a membrane that you can push on.You better know how taut that membrane is, and how many people will hold you in if you get resistance from that membrane. Each person will have a different membrane (a contractor at Microsoft got fired for breaking an NDA once, if I did the exact same thing my boss would have shrugged it off). Each company has a different membrane, too. What I was doing at Microsoft was NOT tolerated at Google or Apple, for instance.
Following
