Biz & IT —

Blogging your way to the unemployment line

Corporate blog use in America is way above that found in Europe and Asia, but …

John Mackey, CEO of grocer Whole Foods, has found out the hard way that it's easy to get into trouble over online postings. For the last few years, Mackey has participated in Yahoo stock forums and other places under the name "Rahodeb" (an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah), a move that is now being used against him in an FTC probe of a proposed buyout of a rival grocery chain.

In response, Mackey's corporate blog has been suspended, and he issued a terse apology this week. A special committee of the Whole Foods board is now looking into the matter.

The issue of posting about one's work on public blogs and message boards isn't just one that affects top executives. When they do it, it raises questions about attempted manipulation of stock prices and similar matters, but companies are just as concerned when lower-level employees get the blogging bug. Trade secrets could leak out, or the company could come off looking poorly.

Many companies are now cracking down on bloggers, firing employees who post unflattering information about the company in public. Wired has just noted the new Proofpoint survey on corporate monitoring of employee communications. That survey found that 32 percent of companies employ people whose job responsibilities include sifting through outgoing e-mail. 14 percent of companies have disciplined employees for improper use of social networking sites, and nine percent have fired people within the last year for items that they posted on blogs or message boards.

That's a lot of firings—and it gives a good reason for workers to be concerned about the material that they post publicly. Some might think that companies are cracking down on bloggers only to simultaneously ramp up their use of corporate blogs to get an accurate (and controlled) message out. That's not the case, though; according to Lewis Public Relations, which did a survey earlier this year and found that only five percent of large and mid-sized companies around the world use a corporate blog.

That study also revealed intriguing cultural differences between continents. Only 2.5 percent of the included European companies use a corporate blog, a number that was more than doubled in Asia, where 5.5 percent of companies use them. In the US, that number jumps to a whopping 14 percent. Clearly, American executives have gotten the memo that customers and shareholders like to know what's going on with the firm, and like to see a human face instead of a corporate facade.

Channel Ars Technica