Thomas Nelson Publishers’s Corporate Blogging Rules
Working Smart: Corporate Blogging Rules
via Micro Persuasion: Help Write a Corporate Blogging Policy
My company, Thomas Nelson Publishers, is about to launch a corporate blog aggregator site
I’ve really been getting in to book blogs lately, so this effort by Thomas Nelson Publishers is good news to me. I’m also very intrigued and pleased by the openness with which they’re pursuing this blogging policy.
So far it doesn’t look to be presented so much as a blogging policy as it is rules for membership in the blogregation portal. I mean there are some really good rules in there, but it’s not really laid out as “follow these rules if you work for us and blog”. Perhaps it should be a little more of that, or at least some of the rules should be in a policy like that, while others might only apply to the portal membership. Since they’re boldly going into this new space, and are laudably encouraging the employees to come along, it would be both in the company’s and the empoyees’ best interests to be clear in their expectations, as has been noted elsewhere.
As far as the policy itself is concerned, there are lots of little details that I have questions or opinions about, but I only have 3 comments of substance:
“Employees who wish to blog about the company must use a service such as TypePad.com, Blogger.com, or MySpaces.com.”
What about people who have their own blogs on their own domains who are running MovableType or WordPress (like me, for instance)? Are they disallowed from the program, or is the list of “blogging services” simply a list of examples? If so, perhaps a clearer wording is called for.
5. You agree not to disclose any sensitive, proprietary, confidential, or financial information about the company, other than what is publicly available in our SEC filings and corporate press releases. This includes revenues, profits, forecasts, and other financial information related to specific authors, brands, products, product lines, customers, operating units, etc.
I think this one is particularly important, and TN has done a pretty good job of defining it specifically enough to be enforceable. From what I read here, “Things are really great at Thomas Nelson” kinds of posts aren’t banned by this rule unless they refer to fiscal wellness. This is the kind of rule that Mark Jen would have benefitted from.
8. You agree not to post advertisements, solicitations and/or market and/or promote any business or commercial interest, chain letters or pyramid schemes.
Not knowing how this portal idea is going to be architected, it’s a little difficult to envision, but it seems to me that there must be ways to publish the employees content without making them remove ads from their site. For example, TN could republish the contents of the employee blog’s RSS and be able to control whether or not those ads appear on the TN site without having to make the blogger remove them from their own site.
Other notes of less importance:
- Why “under your own name” and what, exactly, does that mean? Does that just mean that you can’t blog as “Thomas Nelson Employee #1″, or do they specifically want people to use their actual first and last names (no aliases)? What if someone has privacy concerns and wants to blog under a nom de plume, but tells TN what the alias they will use is? Having until recently had those kinds of concerns myself, I think this is important.
- in general, the rules could more clearly define behavior that’s either outside or inside the rules. Phrases like “provided your tone is respectful” and words like “embarrassing” are wholly open to subjective interpretation and should be clarified.
- As Steve Rubel writes, I have no idea what a persons’ “publicity rights” are.
- Point 11 (“You agree to conform to the rules of the Thomas Nelson Company Handbook…”) seems redundant. Wouldn’t this person have had to agree to those rules when they started working at TN?
- I’m curious as to the legal standing of statements such as “You assume full legal responsibility and liability for all actions arising from your posts” as I’m sure others are. To what extent can TN successfully disclaim responsibility for posts that they republish on their site? What are their liabilities from this standpoint? Not an issue for the policy, I suppose, but an interesting question nonetheless.
In any case, Thanks for sharing this, Michael. I hope to see some kind of corporate blogging organization grow that can help companies navigate these untested waters, and this would be a good starting point for any companies blogging policy.
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