{"id":207,"date":"2007-07-02T13:48:34","date_gmt":"2007-07-02T13:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/02\/TurningLemonsIntoLemonade.aspx"},"modified":"2007-07-02T13:48:34","modified_gmt":"2007-07-02T13:48:34","slug":"turning-lemons-into-lemonade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/02\/turning-lemons-into-lemonade\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning lemons into lemonade"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sxc.hu\/photo\/734826\" target=\"_blank\" atomicselection=\"true\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; border-right-width: 0px\" height=\"240\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/content\/binary\/Turninglemonsintolemonade_C360\/image.png\" width=\"160\" align=\"left\" border=\"0\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>The web, the ultimate tool for the generation and dissemination of irony, hasn&#8217;t lost it&#8217;s touch.&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/google-health-ads.blogspot.com\/2007\/06\/does-negative-press-make-you-sicko.html\">A recent post by a Google employee<\/a> intended to illustrate how advertising can be used for issue management created a bit of&#8230; you guessed it&#8230;&nbsp;an issue.&nbsp;&nbsp;While I&#8217;m sure the movie was not a target but provided&nbsp;Lauren Turner with a great segue into a pertinent topic,&nbsp; <span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/posts\/tag\/google+sicko+search+ads\">the blogstorm<\/span> which resulted highlights an important point: when blogging on a corporate site&#8230; just how much can you say?<\/p>\n<p>When we were ramping up to do the Windows Live Hotmail beta we knew that in addition to the&nbsp;private beta tester&nbsp;forum we wanted to have a public mechanism for putting out the good word about our new baby.&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/mailcall.spaces.live.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Hotmail team blog<\/a> was a &#8220;grassroots&#8221; effort, driven by the line-level employees and not by our PR department and, as a result, we needed to make it clear to the powers-that-be that we had our act together and&nbsp;weren&#8217;t going to post something which would prove embarrassing.&nbsp; To smooth the way I wrote up a guide to communicating with the outside world which covered newsgroups, dealing with press calls and, of course, blogging.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Personal blogs are just that, personal blogs.&nbsp;&nbsp;Everyone puts the requisite disclaimer on their blog (&#8220;the opinions expressed here&#8230; blah blah blah&#8221;) but it&#8217;s pretty much accepted that unless you have a company logo emblazoned at the top of your page there is no other source for the drivel contained within.&nbsp; There&#8217;s no need to set up regulations for your own blog.<\/p>\n<p>If, however,&nbsp;you&#8217;re planning on starting a blog for your team, product or whatever you must set up some guidelines, there&#8217;s no way around it.&nbsp; If your company already has a policy on blogging, start there, it will provide a great framework for your new rules.&nbsp; There are also a ton of great blogging guidelines blog posts on the web.&nbsp; In the fallout of the Google&#8217;s Sicko-gate&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattcutts.com\/blog\/company-blogging-101\/\">Matt Cutts wrote a good Company Blogging 101 post<\/a> with great tips for corporate bloggers.&nbsp; The article well written and broken into easily digestible sections.&nbsp;If you blog on a site for your employer (or a site which is identified with a work project) I highly recommend you read Matt&#8217;s post and figure out how you can work the salient points into your own policy or mental framework.<\/p>\n<p>So, back to my original question: how much can you say on a company-sponsored blog?&nbsp; The answer: as much as you like&#8230; but you <strong>have<\/strong> to establish the bounds well in advance.&nbsp; Corporate America is starting to realize the value of blogging as a tool for customer relations, PR, advertising and more but many companies are still quite shy when it comes to taking the plunge.&nbsp; Creating a solid set of posting guidelines will keep your boss and PR firm happy (and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shahine.com\/omar\/Lenovo.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">keeping your team blog on the net will make your customers happy<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Link: <a title=\"http:\/\/www.mattcutts.com\/blog\/company-blogging-101\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mattcutts.com\/blog\/company-blogging-101\/\">http:\/\/www.mattcutts.com\/blog\/company-blogging-101\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The web, the ultimate tool for the generation and dissemination of irony, hasn&#8217;t lost it&#8217;s touch.&nbsp; A recent post by a Google employee intended to illustrate how advertising can be used for issue management created a bit of&#8230; you guessed it&#8230;&nbsp;an issue.&nbsp;&nbsp;While I&#8217;m sure the movie was not a target but provided&nbsp;Lauren Turner with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-techblog","tag-blogging"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.little.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}