The do’s and don’ts of company blogging, at law.com
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
The list looks pretty sensible. A few excerpts:
DO implement a clear policy on employee blogs, especially those in which senior executives contribute. Chances are, a number of your employees already have a blog that prominently features their association with the business, and many are saying plenty of things (and sharing images) relating to the company. Some of that content may be innocuous; other types may be embarrassing or come back to haunt the company in litigation. Implementing and enforcing a clear policy that provides reasonable parameters for such postings can save you headaches down the road. . . .
DO consider, before creating a corporate blog, how the posted content will affect the company’s discovery and document-retention obligations. . . . DO be mindful of privacy and information security laws. Collecting personal information about individuals who post and/or visit the blog — from names and e-mail addresses to Web site cookies and URLs — must comply with [law].
DON’T terminate employees for posting inappropriate content to corporate blogs without considering the risk of wrongful termination claims, especially where the company does not have a consistent practice on how it treats employees who post content online. Employees may claim that the employer authorized the posting, and is now discriminating against them for exercising their right to organize.
A lot of the discussion is relatively common-sense — author maintenance and so forth. But the post also covers a wide range of the potential legal consequences of blogging — from securities law to labor and employment law to discovery. It’s eye-opening to go over the number of ways a blog could create some sort of legal question or responsibility. Law of the horse, indeed.
February 17, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (1)
Simon - February 26, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Re “a clear policy on employee blogs,” I’m not sure that the assertion that the “[c]hances are[] [that] a number of your employees already have a blog that prominently features their association with the business, and many are saying plenty of things (and sharing images) relating to the company” should go unchallenged. What’s the basis for the assumption that employees are blogging about the field in which they work, or still less, are blogging specifically about the company they work for?
A better argument, surely, is employees blogging on company time (which presumably would be treated the same as undertaking any other kind of unproductive activity), and employees blogging eponymously (customers googling them and associating them with the company, even if the blog has nothing to do with the company – for example, would you do business with a company that employed the blogger “Armando” from Daily Kos?).
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