Don’t Get Dooced

by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

Only 12% of Fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog. Compare that to the millions of personal blogs using tools like WordPress and Blogger. Maybe you write one yourself. And as work is such a large part of our lives, maybe you even mention office life in your posts. It can’t hurt, can it? Well, people have been sacked for blogging about their workplace.

Catherine Sanderson, a 33-year old woman working in Paris for a British accountancy firm, won her employment tribunal last year after she was fired for her blog ‘Petite Anglaise’ , which her employers said brought the company into disrepute. Sanderson never named the firm online, but it wasn’t the first company to get nervous about what employees were writing on the internet. Back in 2002 Heather Armstrong, a web designer from Los Angeles, lost her job after her employers decided they didn’t appreciate what she had written on her website. The episode led to a new word: dooced, to be fired for something you wrote on a blog.

The informal communication style that comes with writing on the web and the fact that you are detached from your audience creates a risky environment. It’s easy to believe that no one except family is reading what you write, so it won’t matter if you post about your latest project. Unfortunately, if your employer finds out that you have posted company secrets on line it won’t matter if the only person who read it was your mum. Here are some guidelines for making sure that you don’t put yourself or your organisation at risk:

• Check out your company’s blogging policy. Technology firms like Sun and IBM have had policies in place for years; other industries are now catching up.
• Make sure you understand the policy on intellectual property and never write about anything that is share-price sensitive.
• Read up on defamation, and avoid posting remarks about competitors and colleagues.
• Understand what information in your company is classified as ‘confidential’.
• Never write about anything that presents a physical security risk like whether it is possible to tail someone through a door to a secure area or what time a delivery of new equipment is turning up on site.
• If your company has a corporate blog, read it. Find out what information is already in the public domain. If you are desperate to write about your job for career purposes, volunteer to write for the corporate blog. That way your posts will be seen by the site administrator or editor and checked against your corporate guidelines first.

If that all sounds big brother-ish, then you’re right, it is. Employers expect their staff to be mindful of the organization’s reputation, both in and out of work time. Your company can’t stop you blogging about your job, just like if you were talking to friends about your day in a bar. However, the audience and impact of words on the web are much larger, and the sticking power of your comments is much greater. With far-reaching impacts, you do have to be careful about what you say or risk joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Armstrong’s writing now supports her family; her husband now works full-time as the administrator of her blog. Sanderson’s memoir has been published on both sides of the Atlantic and she’s now working on a novel. There’s not a great incentive to protect sensitive corporate information if the infamy that comes with being fired brings much better rewards than the desk job, but of course not every fired employee is going to get a cult following and a fat contract for a book. The hype around these two high-profile sackings is largely because the companies weren’t named online and the reasons for dismissal appeared to some to be contrived.

Employment law differs all over the world, but in the UK employers can monitor how their IT systems are used only for legitimate business purposes. The employer also has to make it clear that monitoring is going on, as employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The easiest way to manage this is to never write your blog on company time. Many companies block access to social networking and blogging sites as a matter of course through their firewalls.

Think of it this way: would your company let a journalist follow you round for a day to learn about your workplace and your new projects? Most companies have dedicated spokespeople with media training. Blogging makes every employee a journalist, and you should take that into account if you don’t want to get dooced.