IT Business Insider - Home

Enterprise Edge

Blurring the Borders

Blurring the Borders (continued)

Do the Right Thing
Steve Rubel, a marketing strategist who is a senior vice president at the Edelman PR agency located in New York, N.Y., faces an increasingly common work/personal life challenge: how to blog about your personal interests when your personal interests overlap, to a great extent, with the work you do.

Rubel was hired by Edelman in part on the strength of Micro Persuasion, Rubel's enormously popular website that serves as a source for information and opinion on the intersection of technology, media and marketing. "Edelman has a very comprehensive policy and it's been recently expanded to include some systems by which if you want to blog about a client, we're encouraged to seek out the person who works for that client and ask them if it's okay," he says. However, he notes, "I just usually don't do that, because it takes a long time, and usually when I have an idea I want to post it."

In any case, he adds, "the company does not really have any direct control over the blog. Nobody's checking it every day. But at the same time, you have to be careful what you say, because it can have ramifications."

The Policies of Persuasion
Despite the murky boundaries of this new world, there are common sense -- and legally smart -- policies and procedures that employers can put into place to protect themselves and their employees from liability. (article continues)


<< Previous Page

Next Page >>