Panel: Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations; Ellen Simonetti,
author of Diary of a Flight Attendant and former Delta Airlines Flight
Attendant; John Slafsky, Partner, Wilson Sonsini. I didn’t catch the
moderator’s name.
Slafsky: Blogs are the Next Email for Lawyers
[Internal Blogging|External Blogging] Policies
Simonetti: Delta, of course, had no blogging or internet policy.
Slafsky: it’s, of course, good to come up with a policy, but, it’s
not going to be a cure-all. You can’t anticipate everything, so you
need abstract things.
Shel recalls an earlier quote from Slafsky: “you shouldn’t do
anything stupid.” And you’ve got the Scoble (from podcasts I’ve heard)
point that if you’re going to publicly blog about a company, make
sure you know the goals and culture of that company.
Controlling the Corporate Voice
Slafsky: “The short answer is that lawyers are cringing.”
Esp. those that work with/for public companies.
What Exec Has the Time for Blogging
Schwartz is cited as an example. Slafsky says that McNealy is
prohibited from blogging; his style of communicating doesn’t match.
When it comes to walking the delicate line of what to make public
and what to keep secret, Shel suggests that any C-level person already
knows that extremely well, so it’s not an issue of needing a lawyer
looking over their shoulder.
What Could Kryptonite Have Done Better?
Shel: The first company hit by bad blogging PR. A Kryptonite PR person
said they were working “around the clock” trying to figure out what to
do. There wasn’t an understanding, perhaps in anyone’s heard,
Kryptonite and otherwise, of what you’d do.
Blogger Arms Race
A MSFT PR fire-fighter said he used to have 10 days to respond to a
PR-crisis, but now he has 4 hours. There’s mention of using your own
bloggers to respond: a sort of blogger arms race.
How Could “The Bloggers” be Negatively Effected
Salfsy: the 1st amendment issues do a lot of shielding. But, there
will probably be some big liability cases very soon.
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