Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’m now listening to Nicki Dugan of Yahoo, Ben Edwards of IBM and Betsy Aoki (Microsoft) talking about corporate blog policy guidelines at the Blog Business Summit. 

Nicki said that when the corporate blogging policy came out at Yahoo, there was a huge, collective sigh of relief.  It was “like a coming out” for the bloggers.  They could see the policy, the ambiguity around blogging was removed, so employees all knew what would be tolerated and what won’t.

Ben is fairly new to IBM (since 2005), joining IBM when IBM’s corporate communications group decided to get into blogging.  He’s proud that the guidelines they developed are “encouraging” in terms of employee blogs. 

In fact, he showed that if you look at the IBM.com home page today (10.26.2006), you can find all sorts of information about business blogging, including their business blogging guidelines for everyone to share.

Betsy talked about how blogging came out of the technical community - at Microsoft, it’s all abotu the developers.  Betsy came into MSFT in 2003 where there were a few bloggers.  At the developers conference in 2003, there was a “pile-on” of people who wanted to blog the conference and keep going.  So they quickly went from 20 bloggers to 200 in weeks.  During the expansion, Betsy noted they struggled with the notion of a blog policy.  Someone came up with the phrase:  “Blog smart.”

That’s been a huge jump for Microsoft because they couldn’t just point to a rule and make decisions based on the rules.  It allowed lots of people to leap onto the blog platform, and it challenged corporate flexibility.  With more than 3,000 bloggers, there is now so much information and knowledge being shared.  It’s also helped show the human side of Microsoft.

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