Employee Blogs: A personal blog can impact your business
Blogs are powerful. You probably know that if you are running a business blog. But have you considered how other blogs might be affecting your company as well? Mainly, employee blogs.
Because EVERYONE has a blog these days. Right now, as we live and breath, a new blog goes up every 8 seconds. Millions and millions of new blogs every year. And some of those blogs are being written by your employees.
But no worries right? They are personal blogs. You’ve done searches with your company name and nothing negative comes up….
But have you done searches on your employees and their names? Because if you are have high public visibility, your customers are in fact searching some of those names.
Let me give you an example. If “Joe Klecko” (not a real person I hope…) is your star salesman by day, but posting nude pictures on his blog or his MySpace page at night, some of your clients know it. Because they don’t just do business with your company. They do business with Joe, too. And they want to know who they are doing business with.
So Joe’s nighttime blog escapades are directly impacting you, your sales, and your company. I’m sure he never considered it, and you might not have either. But we live in the information age, and everything that is on the web is accessible by all of your customers. Once again, blogs are powerful, and that goes for employee blogs too. So how an employee carries themselves online does in fact effect you and your business.
So what can you, as the employer, do? This is where it get’s tricky. Because it’s going to come down to you and your company’s individual employee policies. In some states, you cannot do anything, because your employees have the right to do just about anything they want to do on their off time. Think about how many times policewomen and public figures have posed nude in magazines and kept their jobs. Yes, some of them have been fired as well, but it all comes down to your company policy and your state and local laws regarding fair employment.
But the best thing to do is to be proactive. If you are thinking about hiring a new person, you might want to spend a little time googling their name. I don’t know about your company, but with mine, I want to know if my new hire is running a heavy bondage blog as a hobby. Because that will have an effect on my business. And it might with yours too.
Another way to be proactive with employee blogs is to train them correctly from the beginning. Make sure they are aware that they do in fact represent you and your company and that their actions in their off hours might affect their employ. This may stop them from crossing a line that hurts your sales and your public image.
Because your public image is not just you and your brand. It does encompass every single one of your employees. So you need to do what you can to keep that image as pristine as possible.
Have an open dialogue with your employees and try to teach them to have the same pride that you have for your company. If you point it out to them, they may not build that blog or personal page that hurts your business.