Employers Need to Define Corporate Blogging Policies

In recent months, employers such as Google, Nunavut Tourism, Starbucks, the U.S. Senate and the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre have all supposedly fired employees for "inappropriate" blogging.

An article by Jason Young in the April 2005 issue of the newsletter Internet and E-Commerce Law in Canada explores how workplaces should deal with the proliferation of blogs in order to avoid conflict situations. A summary of the article is available through Bar-eX, the Law Society of Upper Canada's current awareness service.

Young proposes a number of guidelines that could help define a blogging policy:

• stipulate compliance with any existing employee code of conduct
• suggest using a disclaimer that a blogger's views are his or her own
• include a restatement of any existing corporate confidentiality and non-disclosure requirements
• stipulate that bloggers must not let their blogging interfere with their work commitments