Blog Rules. A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues

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by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
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Blog Rules. A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues.
Flynn, Nancy
New York: Amacom, 2006.

Nancy Flynn has written five books in addition to Blog Rules. Of these, four are clearly aimed at business audiences. She also organizes seminars and presentations on topics related to electronic communications in the corporate world. We must presume that she knows what she is doing.

Business readers may well find this a useful guide not only to the nature of blogging, but particularly to the dangers it may present to their operations. Many readers, however, will find it highly repetitive, often maddeningly so.

Blogging is, of course, a relatively new phenomenon, even in Internet Time. Despite its recent arrival, however, blogging has had an enormous impact. It has affected the way news is produced and delivered, and much complicated the formerly safely sealed corporate world of internal communications. Now, happy or furious customers and contented or disgruntled employees alike can convey their attitudes to potentially huge audiences almost instantaneously.

As Flynn points, out this means that on the one hand, businesses cannot neglect blogging as a new form of advertising, but must also beware the unmanaged or mismanaged release of corporate information. And negative results easily and quickly include damaging information cascading through the blogosphere, or perhaps most threatening of all outcomes, lawsuits or criminal charges.

The rules of Blog Rules are just that; thirty-six pithy rules such as # 20: "The blog is all about content." (p. 189) Most of these are aimed more at avoiding possible negative consequences than at achieving positive outcomes. For example, at p.19 we are cautioned:

Giving employees free rein over corporate communications — without strategic blog-related rules, policies, procedures, training, and technology in place — opens the organization up to potential disasters including the loss of trade secrets, confidential information, and intellectual property; negative publicity, damaged reputations, and public embarrassment; workplace lawsuits alleging copyright infringements, defamation, sexual harassment, and other claims; court sanctions, legal settlements, and regulatory fines; and lost employee productivity.

These threats, of course, are by no means new ones to the corporate world. The author's point is that blogging facilitates them at the speed of electronic communications.

Blog Rules also has very useful glossaries and sample blog policies for particular uses in business operations. It is a quick introduction to the issues, but unfortunately by no means a painless one.

Blog Rules, while conveying useful information and suggesting an array of policy and organizational responses to the charms and dangers of business blogging, is maddeningly repetitive. It seems aimed at a corporate executive who is constantly interrupted in his or her reading.

The author seems confident that such an executive would be comforted by the knowledge that if he or she missed a particular tip, it is certain to come around again, perhaps three or four times in the next several pages. So the cautions circle about the reader continually, like carousel horses prancing to horror film musical scores. After a few pages, one tires of seeing the rolling eyes and frothing mouth of any particular mount coming around yet again.

Nancy Flynn has done a good job of research and clearly knows the issues facing the business world. However, Blog Rules needed a more empowered or perhaps more determined editor. This work, useful as it is, could have been cut to at least half its current size of 226 pages. This would have made it even more suited to the harried executive audience for whom it is intended.