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Cisco admits to blogging fear
Cisco blogger John Earnhardt is wondering if the of network gear should do more blogging. Earnhardt is a senior manager of policy communications for Cisco's Worldwide Government Affair Group (simply put, he's in public relations).
He proudly proclaims that the company has "a handful of blogs", and points to event driven blogs and concludes that Cisco is doing "a decent job of giving some flavor of what we are interested in."
Earnhardt however must be doubting that statement (thank goodness!), because he continues his blog posting questioning if the company should open up more. If it should, for instance, provide a blogging platform for all its employees.
The answer to that question can only be a resounding: Duh! I can't believe that companies are even asking that question in 2007.
If you're restricting what your employees blog about, you're essentially saying that you don't trust them. But don't you also trust that they won't harm the company when they talk about it during the weekend and at night when they aren't at work?
Of course things will go wrong. Employees will make stupid mistakes and they will write things that might make you decide to fire those employees. But again, wouldn't that employee be making the same comments in public before? Blogs just do a better job at exposing those people, but it doesn't turn your number one workers into a secret exposing devil.
What exactly is Cisco afraid of? That its carefully crafted PR strategy is undercut by Cisco employees giving honest facts? Doesn't that say more about the (perceived) honesty in your PR strategy than it does about your employees?
Cisco coined the phrase "the participation age", but for some reason Earnhardt claims that for Cisco is enough to just talk and not participate.
Spanish
Someone actually reads my blog postings?
You are a good blogger and write headlines that make people want to read more (that's blogging 101, of course), however, I think saying that we have "Blogging Fear" is a bit of a stretch. We blog. Go to blogs.cisco.com and check them out.
My posting was merely a navel gazing exercise after a conversation with some reporters. I was simply wondering if we should do more on the blogging front...and either identify more areas that we should be blogging on and/or open up a platform (hosted by Cisco) that allows employees to blog. Our employees can clearly blog now on multiple free platforms (and they do), however if we do end up providing the platform down the road, it won't be to negatively "expose" employees, as you put it...it will be to showcase their brilliance and expertise.
As I said in my original posting which you linked to, "Being in the media relations business, one of my first instincts is to be a bit paranoid, so, of course, I responded that (employee blogs) would certainly be good for (reporters)..(what great potential copy, right?), but from a corporate perspective there is a loss of control of messaging and focus and direction...potentially, that is." (i.e. As a corporation, we have duties to customers, shareholders and employees.)
And, I think you are reading an old bio. I used to be in government affairs, but now am back in our public relations group.
So, thanks for reading our blog...we also have podcasts, videos and more at newsroom.cisco.com.
Posted by: John Earnhardt | April 30, 2007 8:23 PM