Top 10 Rules To Help Enterprise Bloggers Spend Less Time With Attorneys

CUNY’s school of journalism has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to develop an online guide to help educate bloggers, citizen journalists and others about legal risks so they can stay out of court.

Jeff Jarvis, head of interactive journalism at CUNY and author of the Buzzmachine blog, is contributing to the project which he views as important. The Media Law Resource Center keeps a list of U.S. legal cases in which bloggers have been sued for libel and related claims (Note there have been two “wins” for plaintiffs vs. bloggers for libel). Leo Leporte and This Week In Tech just launched a new podcast called This Week in Law… GCI’s Lee Couch sent me the draft of a bill before the Texas Senate that will extend Texas libel laws to on-line venues.

All the activity in this space motivated me to write a post on the legal risks with which enterprise bloggers need to be familiar to stay out of court and keep their jobs. It is important that you understand a couple things (I guess the lawyers would call these “disclaimers”) before you read this. First, I’m not a lawyer, but I have spent time with some very good corporate lawyers talking about these issues. Second, this list is not going to be sufficient for highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals where pharma lawyers and bloggers can’t seem to get past issues like adverse effects reporting. So with that said, here are 10 rules for enterprise bloggers:

1. Comply with your company’s code of conduct. Just about every company has one, but I am surprised by the number of employees who don’t bother reading them. Bloggers need to be experts on their companies’ codes of conduct or risk spending way too much time with their attorneys getting educated.
2. This is probably in your code of conduct but…. Don’t post trade secrets or confidential information. You may be saying “duh” right now. I’m throwing it on the list because a lot of people don’t understand their company’s definition of confidential information and if you are blogging you better. This is a hot issue for executives considering allowing their employees to blog, by the way. I just remind them that it’s much easier to share trade secrets via e-mail than blogs.
3. Related to #2, don’t post another company’s trade secrets or confidential information. If you just learned something interesting in a meeting or phone call with a business partner and you want to blog about it, you need to ask for their “ok” then and there. Disclosing a partner’s confidential info can cause a real problem for you and your employer so be cautious.
4. Don’t “borrow” other people’s content for your blog (and, yes, even if it’s just internal). That includes words, images, videos, etc. I recently watched a video on a company’s internal blog. It was a great video set to The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” That’s a no, no. Don’t do it unless you are ready to take a call from an angry (and probably talented) copyright lawyer. By the way, I took a call from an angry copyright lawyer once. He tried to get me to pull some photos of Marilyn Monroe I was selling for a photographer on-line. I knew my client took and owned the photos, but I learned that “proof of ownership” is important and not always easy to acquire even for the true property owner.
5. Don’t exaggerate how wonderfully your company’s products perform without real evidence. Example: “Our product is 100x faster than our competitors…” If you are going to beat your proverbial chest you better have the evidence to back it up. And, don’t mistake real evidence for the “value proposition” cobbled together by marketing. If you are going to make a claim you better have credible, (ideally) third-party research to back it up. There are some large companies out there that will come after you and your company in a skinny minute if they think you are unjustly slamming their products.
6. Don’t ever knowingly mislead your readers. You must provide sufficient information to make your posts clear to the “average Joe.” My friend Andy Ogilvie is a plaintiff class action law suit attorney and this would be his number one rule for any enterprise blogger. Some businesses are really good at being honest and misleading at the same time. The example that comes to mind (thanks to yesterday’s NY Times) is broadband providers that promise service “up to” certain speeds. The “up to” refers to speeds at ideal conditions like living on top of the central switch. Lawyers typically handle this with “small print” in user agreements. If you need “small print” on your blog you better get to know your attorneys now in the event that someone actually reads your misleading blog.
7. Take the highly factual road when blogging about competitors. Lawyers get really nervous when they learn you might “call out” competitors or review your products and services vis a vis their products and services. In fact, when you start talking about “price” there are federal and state and foreign country laws that need to be considered. Most lawyers would rather you just avoid talking about “price” all together. Life is too short to understand all the laws around talking about your competitors and price so you better check with legal before doing either.
8. If you are posting on the safety aspects of your products run it by the attorneys. As with “price” , safety is another area where a blogger can never know enough about the laws around the world to make it safe to post. A blogger also may not know all the product issues a company is addressing at any given moment so it’s best to talk to the lawyers about what you can and can’t say about safety.
9. Customer reviews need to be 100 percent honest and transparent. That is, they need to be real users of the product or service and reflect their real experiences. If the customer has any sort of a connection to your company you should explain that, too.
10. If you think you are entering problematic territory, don’t hesitate to check with your attorney(s). Robert Scoble posted or said somewhere that he stayed out of trouble at Microsoft by being smart enough to know when to pick up the phone and call the lawyers. That’s a good rule to follow.

As I read this list it makes enterprise blogging sound like a legal quagmire. It’s really not. In my experience enterprise bloggers and lawyers tend to agree on a lot of things (e.g., be transparent, be truthful, don’t mislead) at a high-level. Savvy enterprise bloggers don’t spend a lot of time with their lawyers. A small percentage of Dell’s blog posts, for instance, end up being reviewed by legal according to Lionel Menchaca, their chief blogger (and GCI client). When I first talked to Todd “Turbo” Watson at IBM he said he had never even talked to IBM attorneys about his blogging — I wonder if that’s still the case?

But the devil is in the details so it’s important to get in a room, nose-to-nose and talk about these rules and others that may be specific to your company or industry.

I’m sure there are other rules that should be on the list, but these are the ones I seem to consistently discuss with attorneys working in a wide-range of industries. What did I miss?

19 November 2006 | Blogging, Challenges, Ethics, Legal | Comments