The Wiser Customer Weblog

Building an acceptable use policy for blogging can be one of the tougher jobs for a company’s human resources and internal security divisions to develop. Blogging is a rapidly growing mode of communication that provides readers with material on everything from the day-to-day comments of authors, movie stars, characters on soap operas to hard-hitting news articles and columns. The growth of blogging has given rise to a multitude of programs and tools designed to help everyone from the personal blogger to corporate users.

But how does blogging affect an organization’s Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP)? In order to address blogging accurately in an AUP, you must first define what constitutes a blog. The word “blog” is actually a shortened version of “web log” and is similar to a message board in that one can post thoughts and opinions to be read by others. A blog can be viewed by the public or accessible only via password depending on how the owners have set it up. Blogs can provide in-depth information about specific topics or they can be a place for writers to vent their feelings, but their ultimate goal is to bring readers together and then encourage interaction among them.

Blogging can be a harmless and interesting way to communicate with like-minded others but, like any unmanaged activity, the opportunity for abuse is always there. If an organization’s AUP addresses their Instant Messaging, Peer-to-Peer, email and other Web-based communications, they need to consider blogging as an important technology to include. Organizations should decide of they want their employees to be able to read blogs or post to them as part of an overall communications policy.

What are the ramifications of no AUP where blogs are concerned? The rapid growth rate of blogs in the country means that entire services like MyFamily.com and MyPlace.com are hosting communities of bloggers. A criminal utilized personal data posted in some blogs to stalk and attack young high-school girls.

Employees that post their identities and information to a response on a blog can influence decisions. For example, if an employee of a major computer corporation responded to a technical blog with advice about avoiding a new product line because of a lot of known ‘bugs’ the company is leaving itself open to legal exposure. Corporations require employees to sign non-disclosure agreements for a reason, the threat of exposure where company confidential information and intellectual property is concerned could have devastating financial consequences.

This is only one example, there are many others. If a person severely disagrees with the content of a blog and starts what is known as a ‘flame’ war with the blogger through the comments section, the corporation may be held liable for the harassment if the employee is posting the responses through the corporation’s computers. What happens on company computers, whether permissible or not, is the responsibility of the company. They are considered legally culpable.

There are legal and financial reasons to be very clear in the AUP with regards to blogging. Some corporations, although only a small percentage, employ software that screens where and how an employee can browse the web. If there are filters preventing an employee from viewing a pornographic website, then there can be filters that prevent the viewing of political or day trading blogs. Blogs that focus on financial and business issues are growing more popular every day. These blogs may be a source of entertainment and information, but it is up to the corporation to decide the level of involvement that an employee may have.

It’s worth mentioning that anonymous guests can read most blogs, although they may not be able to post comments or responses. Blogs can be enormous resources for students, educators and other individuals for discussion, debate and the sharing of experiences. However, they need to be controlled and monitored. Blogs are an excellent marketing tool, hooking visitors into the site by providing them with financial advice or credit building tips, for example. The marketing a blog can provide can translate into tens of thousands of hits a day for a site. It’s also important for some companies to get their message out there; blogs can put a human face on a company that seems only to be a corporate entity. That human face can improve customer relations, invite consumer contact and increase company visibility. However, employees should be educated about the type of information they are allowed to post if they are allowed to respond.

Companies that maintain their own blogs should be particularly attuned to the commentary they generate. Blogging is a new frontier for the corporate world, but as with many prior innovations, they are quickly taking advantage of it. Security, awareness and education will help corporations, employees and even their families from suffering negative experiences while blogging, reading blogs or responding to a blog on the Internet.

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Unknown to most bloggers, there are actually plenty of sources for Free content for their Adsense blog.

Let’s start with the most obvious. Lets start with those wonderful nice folks who visit your blog, some of them on a very regular basis. In one of my Adsense blogs a reader left a fascinating comment recently that opened my eyes to the potential of visitors as a source for lots of valuable free content to a site. They said that they had visited often but had never left a comment until a recent post that I had made provoked them to.

So an excellent way to generate lots of free content for your Adsense blog is by making controversial posts. Comments are indexed by search engines and are capable of attracting search engine traffic to your blog. This means that the more comments you have, the more traffic you are capable of generating at your Adsense blog.

This method of generating lots of free content for an Adsense blog was further emphasized to me when looking through the stats of an old blog that I had set up and neglected because it did not quite work out the way I intended. I was amazed to see some traffic being generated by the site. Curious I checked the log and saw that there was traffic being generated from search engines through spam comments left at the blog. Somehow I had omitted to set up the blog in such a way that all comments have to be moderated before they’re published. I had been rewarded for this mistake with traffic from search engine. Not the kind of traffic that I was interested in, but the whole incident was a big eye opener on the power of plenty of comments at a blog. It can actually be very valuable free content for an Adsense blog.

Find out how you can learn more about the best Adsense make money secrets from an expert who makes over $19,000 a month from Adsense. Or discover an easy way to increase traffic to your Adsense blog using only free articles marketing.

You may have been putting off the idea of writing articles but why? You may be thinking that you’ve got nothing to say or nobody would listen to what you want to say but if that was true how come blog’s have become so popular with the search engines? All the experts out there are doing it so they must be onto something. Blog’s are a great thing because they give your business a bit of personality and move your business away from just a cold emotionless website. Why do you think audio on websites have improved conversion rates, people can connect the sales letter with a person and if you put a picture up there and now they have a face to go with the voice and you improve your conversion even better!

Can you see where we’re going here?

So maybe now your thinking “I need a blog” But do you here’s a couple of reasons against it, you have to remember there’s no point starting a blog if you don’t have the time to add to it on a regular basis or if you don’t have enough to knowledge about your subject to write about it every day, there really is no point just starting a blog and writing any old thing. You’ll find that people will just stop reading it that’s even if they find it in the first place (that’s another day’s article.)

When you think about by looking from the surfer’s perspective would you really want to read the ranting and ravings of someone (o.k. maybe if it was entertaining) but if you didn’t learn from it you’d just move on, this is the “McDonalds” generation people want things and they want them now they haven’t the patience to hang around and they just move on!

After thinking this over maybe a blog isn’t for you, but don’t think that people won’t be interested in what you have to say. If you don’t have the time or the knowledge to write about your subject daily why you don’t put your thoughts in the form of a series of articles. This way you can plod along at your own pace and give some quality information rather that just fluff (nobody likes to read fluff.) You’ll find that your quality article will get passed around and who knows where it could end up. Another benefit of article writing is that people will start to link your name with your product or service, so you come across as being an expert in your field. So when they think of “Product X” your name comes up and where do you think they go to buy it??

So don’t put it off another day, sit down now and put an article together you don’t have to have a degree in English, just put your personality into it and give some great advice or knowledge and you’ll go a long way. And if you first article bombs, don’t give up, some of mine have and some have really taken off for me, you won’t know until you send it out and who knows what might happen?

Best of luck!

Got the article bug yet, if you do send a copy of your article to http://www.barryjmcdonald.com