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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From the floor at the Blog Business Summit, I’m correcting an earlier post where I said you can find Intel’s blogs from their home page.  You can’t.  Which they need to fix.  Here’s the link to their US blogs.

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In the discussion on mixing personal and professional at the Blog Business Summit, a great suggestion I’ve just implemented is to put a personal category in your blog.  You can use a personal category to help people choose whether to read your personal posts.

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Funny that the panel mixing personal and professional at the Blog Business Summit are all laughing about how they taunt each other about experiences and say “I’m going to blog that!”  The room (and the panel) erupted in laughter. 

Robert considers personal posts like seasoning on a meal.  One out of twenty posts could be personal.  And people get engaged in the personal stories. 

In fact, when I gave my part of the panel presentation this morning, I said one of the most oft-commented post in my blog career was the one where I had cried in a Starbucks because I was exhausted.

Robert is talking about how Google rewards single focus from a business blog.  Chris says he throws personal dynamics into his blog that further defines who you are.   

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It’s the first afternoon session at the Blog Business Summit where we have Robert Scoble, Maryam Scoble, Chris Pirillo and Ponzi Indharasophang, and Jory Des Jardins talking about how to mix the personal and professional in a blog.

Robert said Microsoft had a culture that allowed him to express personal opinions and thoughts - which he started doing because some of his readers asked him to.  He said many people who’ve been fired from a company for blogging didn’t know they were doing something wrong.  He thinks people need to know what the risks are about corporate blogging before they make a post that could be risky.  He knew he could be taking risks with his career when he made certain posts, and he knew what he expected the outcomes to be…

Chris and Robert have known each other for years (Robert and Maryam are going to be best man and matron of honor at Chris and Ponzi’s upcoming wedding)… talk about mixing the professional and personal!

Fun, Chris is talking about Intel’s blogs - a link can be found on their home page.  But he’s bashing on them a little about having so few bloggers with so few posts.  (Full disclosure, I’m doing some work for Intel’s software group on blogging)…

He’s saying that Intel should pull in people who really care about what they’re writing about (mentioning people who are blogging outside of Intel, and are Intel employees) because they have the passion, the street cred, and the chops that any corporation should be nurturing as bloggers. 

Robert just said - if you want traffic, do porn…

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