Blogs can boost, wreck careers

About 10 million Americans write blogs, ranging from the confessional and edgy to the technical and mundane, says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Thirty-five million read them.

For businesses, blogs and other forms of personal Internet communication constitute a new frontier fraught with promise and peril. On the one hand, companies are scrambling to use them as a recruiting and marketing tool, and are encouraging some employees to blog. On the other, they are wondering how to deal with the damage that current and former employees and dissatisfied customers can do on the Web.

The result is a “mild level of social panic,” Rainie said. “The lawyers and the marketers are, in many cases, at least in covert war with each other.” For the moment, much of the news falls into the “cautionary tale” category. In August, a California automobile club fired 27 workers for posting messages on the Web that offended co-workers. Not long before, a Boston University instructor was fired for blogging about a distractingly attractive student. A blogging nanny was fired for telling too much about herself and her employers. A New York beauty editor lost a new job because of blogs about the fashion industry.

Andy Fox, a senior investigator who conducts background checks for Investigative Group International, said Internet searches on prospective employees were now common. For high-profile jobs, he said, he will “run everything down on Google if it goes to 27 o’s.” IBM. and Sun Microsystems have instituted blogging policies. Both focus on helping employees write entertaining blogs without revealing company secrets or offending suppliers and customers.

IBM discourages anonymous blogging or covert marketing. Sun urges employees to expose their personalities but warns that “a blog is a public place and you should avoid embarrassing your readers or the company.”

Tim Bray, Sun’s director of Web technologies, said the company realized that it needed the new rules as it prepared to encourage employee blogging and discovered an impediment. Sun had a policy “that no one can say anything publicly without prior legal approval.” With the new rules in place, more than 1,500 employees now have blogs hosted on the company’s computer server.

Jonathan Segal, a Philadelphia employment lawyer, said that overly restrictive policies or publicity about company attacks on bloggers could hurt a company, particularly if it wanted creative young employees. “It may have the effect of driving talent away,” he said.

Still, employment lawyers caution that the 1st Amendment was designed to protect people from the government, not private employers. Only a few states have passed laws preventing companies from reaching into employees’ private, legal activities.

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