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Should companies fire bloggers?

You'll think it strange for me to defend Microsoft, but seeing them on the list Cory has posted of companies that have fired people for blogging taken from an excitable source gave me pause (and made me wonder if Cory is losing his touch). Microsoft are on the list because of this MSNBC story. As I have considered more and more of the grievances listed on the excitable source they seem to have shown people fired not for blogging but for breaking rules of their employment with involvement from a blog. In some cases they say "the blog was just an excuse to fire me" suggesting there was already bad blood, and to exacerbate it in public seems just plain stupid to me.

I'm pretty sure it will happen at each company that encourages blogging sooner or later. We've got around 1,000 Sun employees blogging and so far no-one has done anything really stupid on their blog, but people do actionable things in meetings, over the phone and over e-mail so I see no reason why doing really dumb things over a blog should be exempt from action even when the company involved is a blogging pioneer. We've written a clear policy to help but ultimately people are people.

What's much more amazing is how few of these stories there are. It reinforces the confidence our team had when putting together blogs.sun.com that Sun staff were smart people demonstrating great skill in doing their jobs, and that they could be trusted to speak for themselves. Really there are only three rules for a corporate blogger:
Act as smart as you do in the rest of your job
Don't mess up
Rinse and repeat
I'm pleased to say that my Sun colleagues seem to be doing that, and I'm sure Robert will be pleased his are too. The measure of whether a company is blogophobic is more to do with the view at the top of blogs and who actually participates than it is of normal HR actions which we will all have to do sooner or later.

posted at 11:39 AM (UK) | |

Comments:

I just put this on my blog last week:

Friend and fellow blogger Jeremy Wright was fired this week for blogging about stuff that happened at work. I won't go into the details here, if you are interested you can get them from his web site or read an article in InformationWeek that covers it (Jeremy's kind of famous- he's the guy who sold his blog and then auctioned his blogging skills on eBay). If it isn't plainly obvious by now if you work for a company and you blog about it you run a real risk of being fired for it. It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, if you get fired for it you are still fired. Before you post about something funny/horrible/stupid that happened at work today think about the ramifications. Your blog is a public forum and is no different than if you appeared on the local news and told the same story you are writing about. Ask yourself if you would tell that story on the news. Don't work and blog.

# posted by James Kendrick : 3:03 PM

How is being fired for blogging away company secrets any different from being fired for emailing away company secrets? If you are reckless enough to compromise company confidential information via a blog, you are reckless enough to do it a dozen other ways as well. Any way you do it, the company has the right to fire you.

# posted by Peter Hoskins : 1:19 AM

My "you" above is a general "you" not a specific "you". I should have re-read before hitting post!

# posted by Peter Hoskins : 1:27 AM

Don't worry Peter, I agree. Too bad I didn't know any company secrets I could have divulged (even if I wanted to) ;-)

# posted by Jeremy C. Wright : 4:18 AM