Blogging Policies - first thoughts

Even if we decide that it’s not in our best interest to actively foray into the world of social media with a blog, podcasts or what have you, I strongly suggest we work on a set of blogging and social media policies.

The NewPR Wiki, a group-edited set of links and resources on communications, PR and social media, has two great pages of information on this topic. One contains a list of links to corporate blogging policies, and the other is a collection of articles and blog posts on some legal troubles faced by blogging employees and employers, as well as tips for both groups.

We don’t need to have an external corporate blog to have a blogging policy, or to at least address social media in some of our existing Internet and technology policies. Even if we aren’t officially blogging, we ought to have a set of governing principles in place – this technology is not going to go away!

With an organization as large as ours, it's safe to assume a large number of our employees are blogging unofficially - I can think of half a dozen employees on this floor of this building alone who have personal blogs. Can or should we encourage people to feel free to identify themselves as members of this department when they blog? Or the other end of the spectrum - what about situations like the recent information leak of a prominent Canadian? We should have clear policies in place to deal with this kind of problem.

Blog policies don't have to be punative or restrictive. IBM's blogging policy contains a section on how to blog and suggests points like respect your audience, avoid inflamatory comments, find out who else is blogging and cite them, and be the first to admit and correct your own mistakes.

We can also use a blogging policy to clarify whether employees can blog on company time, whether employees should have a disclaimer if they blog as employees of the Agency, and clarify what topics might be off limits.

In the new year, I hope to do more research on whether other departments have blogging policies (I have heard that DND has one).

Links for December 28-29, 2006

• Politicians parading into social media
  From Shel Isreal, co-author of Naked Conversations: “My hope is that government and elected officials will come en masse to the blogosphere. I'm sure they will come in awkwardly at first, using much of the same rhetoric they use everywhere else. But over time, some of them might learn the real power of social media is not just talking, but listening. In fact, blogging and social media, may be the most blatantly democratic format we've seen come along since the New England-style town meeting.”
  
• Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google
  "Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! 'Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,' Mr Wales said. 'Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.'"
  
• Social Media is No Mo
  Micropersuation’s Steve Rubel opines that there is no longer a need to distinguish “social” media from all other media: “In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies. Newspapers have comments, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and other forms of two-way communications… The changes in communications go deeper, however. The media formerly called mainstream also communicates in a far more conversational tone that it did before -- one we use. Meanwhile, the barriers to becoming a member of the fourth estate have been obliterated by these very same technologies.”

Links for December 27, 2006

• The Queen of England’s annual Christmas address is also available for the first time via podcast.
  
• The Power 50: one blogger’s take on “50 brilliantly crazy & enlightened marketing / media bloggers.”
  
• Also from BuzzCanuck, the top 11 word-of-mouth stories of 2006.
  
• You Deserve More Than Time’s Person of the Year. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser gives Time.com eight tips to “give people more power in Time’s own editorial space.”
  
• Via Micropersuation, Newsweek predicts 2007 will be the Year of the Widget: “If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and YouTube, then it’s a fair bet that 2007 will be about further personalizing life online. Already, portals like Google and Yahoo! offer customizable pages. Want to see a calendar, learn a new word-of-the-day and check local windsurfing conditions all from your homepage? No problem, you have thousands of widgets to choose from. And the fact that they’re so intuitive has made the features very popular.”
  
• Also via Micropersuation, America’s New Digital Divide. “…you will find that the majority of the broadband connected population is passive, not active. Despite all of the wonderful advances in technology, publishing and aggregation tools have been adopted only by only a small minority of users. It's this tiny community, more than any other, that is shaping the technology, media, business and even the geopolitical agenda. Our voices, not always the broader populous, is what rings loudest.”

Links for December 21 and 22

• It's Time for Traffic Stats to Die
  "Yahoo's Chief of Insights reflects what Evan Williams and [Steve Rubel] have been saying for awhile now: the page view is indeed dead. He's calling on the industry to develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. "
  
• The Million Dollar blog post
  Via Marc Snyder (one of the few primarily French blogs I read), this off-topic but charming idea: "It’s simple. Leave your wish for the world as a comment on this post. For each comment we’re going to have someone donate $1 to charity."
  
• Via Inside the Cubicle (a PR blog):

1. CEO Blogging Guide, a concise list of dos and don’ts on CEO blogging; and
2. 5 Social Media Trends that Will Impact PR, including a discussion on the future of the press release: “The press release turned 100 this year, and the public relations and marketing community started to really talk about how to make it better and improve its usefulness.”

• 10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations (via Ketcheson.net)
  
• Digging Deeper::WSJ Gets Comfortable with Blogs, Wants to Boost Community Interesting in-depth interview with Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com about the Journal’s online features, including blogs and their editorial policy on them, citizen journalism and pay vs free content. Should be read in conjunction with a scathing Op-Ed piece that appeared this week in the WSJ called The Blog Mob: "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."
  
• The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging Very clever and well-written. Wouldn’t it be great if Mark Twain were a blogger?
  
• IBM says business must blog

That's it for this week... Happy holidays to our legions of reader(s)!

Links for 19-12-2006

• Global Neighborhoods: the Overview
  Shel Israel is the co-author, with Microsoft’s Robert Scobles, of the seminal corporate blogging book Naked Conversations. He’s just posted the overview of his new book, Global Neighborhoods and is asking for feedback. He says, “Global Neighborhoods looks at the habits of young people to predict the future of business and government. It paints a picture of business and government when a generation that is immersed in social media and immune to traditional marketing and media comes of age.” I suspect this will be a book worth watching out for.
  
• Canadians love blogs
  iMedia Connections released data showing Canadians with the highest level of 'blog visit penetration' (i.e. the highest percentage of people who visited a blog) worldwide in October. Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians visited a blog, followed by 51% of Spaniards and 45% of the French. The US ranked sixth with 36% of the population visiting a blog in October.
  
• Book of lists 2006
  PR Week provides a year-end round-up that includes top 10 PR blunders, 5 brands that rocked, and 5 best-in-class communicators (and some of the worst in each category, too.)
  
• The Social Media Toolbox for PR people
  Via Ketcheson.net (see the original post for a nice compilation of social media 'goodies'), a handy list of social media monitoring, analysis and blogging tools.

Links for 18-12-2006

• CNW Group's media monitoring service broadens its reach to cover more than three million online sources
  "CNW Group has expanded the existing reach of MediaVantage, its online media monitoring service, to cover more than three million blogs. […] With the increasing corporate interest in social media and the influence of blogs, this expanded functionality will be welcomed by public relations professionals tasked with tracking media and online mentions on a daily basis. "
  
• Pentagon PR Blogger Explains Military’s New Media Challenge
  “[T]hat’s the problem for the military, when it comes to new media and bottom-up messaging: How can it join the communications revolution when it can’t organizationally grasp the democratization of media with blogs, online video and podcasting?”
  
• Time Magazine Person of the Year: You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
  

Why we need to adopt RSS

RSS (really simple syndication, among other definitions) is a tool that aggregates information from Web sites of your choosing and packages it for delivery to a specific subscriber. Rather than visiting Web sites looking for updates, an RSS reader bundles the information for you and delivers it to your desktop as new information becomes available. By visiting a single Web page, you can check your feeds as seldom or often as you wish, and you can see at a glance how much new information is available since the last time you checked.

RSS is particularly popular for monitoring news sites and blogs. Popular RSS feed aggregators include Bloglines, Feedburner, Google Reader and NewsGator, to name a few.

From the Web site SnapTech, seven good reasons why you should offer your content in feeds:
• RSS feeds syndicate your content and make it available to other news outlets, websites and blogs.
• By syndicating your content you can reach a much wider audience.
• Feeds are the perfect solution for time-sensitive information - like special travel packages, meeting notices or tech updates.
• RSS is a secure channel that can't be spammed.
• RSS feeds allow your subscribers to control the flow of information they receive. According to a recent study users trust marketers more when they can control the information they receive.
• RSS feeds are compiled according to the user's choices.
• RSS does not involve you in privacy issues- subscription is anonymous.

Wired magazine recently ran a feature about how the US Government is slowly adopting RSS technology on some of its Web sites. “RSS feeds are offered by agencies such as the U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more. However, many foreign governments, including England, France and New Zealand, are way ahead of those in the United States when it comes to RSS.”

The article also observes, "In fact, a small but steadily growing stream of government agencies at the local, state and national levels are also implementing RSS as a natural way to disseminate information to their constituencies. And since almost all government information is useful to somebody, those responsible for informing the public see RSS as a perfect, and inexpensive, method for ensuring that people can get the knowledge they need without a lot of work."

An excellent site called RSS in Government provides a comprehensive list of government RSS feeds not only from the US but all over the world. You can tell at a glance that the Canadian government is painfully behind in adopting this technology.

It is my opinion that RSS is so easy to implement and so key to the new way that people are using the Internet to communicate that this should be one of the first areas that we delve into social media as an Agency. Currently, there are more than a hundred disappointed people subscribing to the empty RSS feed for our department, as offered on the official Government of Canada listing of departmental feeds. At the very least, we should be using RSS to push our newsroom products, but that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg on the ways we can use RSS to get our information out to the public.

Can you think of any other ways we could or should be using RSS?