(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...As an addition to the checklist for starting a corporate blog, who owns the result? From a legal perspective, your employment contract is likely to stipulate that the content, i.e. the string of words residing in a database belongs to the company. But a successful blog as an ongoing conversation between one or few bloggers and a target audience is so much more than that.
As a case in point, Robert Scoble last year left Microsoft, and took with him Scobleizer. He’s now with PodTech.net, but continues his blog, which now supports the PodTech brand as it previously supported Microsoft’s. The case is even more complicated since Scobleizer was started befre Robert Scoble joined Microsoft.
If you develop a ‘celebrity blogger’, her blog will leave with her. It may not be a problem if the blog has run its course for your organisation. But if a blog has become an inherent part of your marketing communications mix, you may want to safeguard against such problem. A few things you can do:
- have more than one blogger working on the blog
- develop a celebrity blog, not a celebrity blogger
- associate the blog somehow with your corporate brand, so that it cannot be easily detached
- an agreement may be possible for the leaving blogger to continue working freelance
