What companies need to know about employee blogging

It's been out there on the WWW since last August, but I only got some guidance on what companies should do if their employees are blogging about their work now.

The article is written by David Ritter of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg and is called "Blogging – What Companies Need to Know".

Advice about employee blogging includes the following:

"The question for employers is, what can/should be done?

Initially, employers should adopt policies regarding blogs and include provisions regarding any prohibitions the employer wishes to establish regarding blogging, whether on the employer’s time, through the use of the employer’s computer systems, or on the employee’s own time and on the employee’s home computer.

Such a policy should include:

• Disclaimer of Organizational Responsibility. Require employees to state that any opinions they express about work-related matters are their own and are not attributable to the organization.Additionally, require bloggers to affirmatively take responsibility and liability for any work-related content or materials contained in their blog.
• Copyrighted Material. Inform employees of the potential civil and criminal penalties for posting copyrighted material in a blog without authorization.
• Respectfulness. State that blogs may not be used to attack or insult the company, its products, its executives, supervisors, coworkers, competitors, or competitor’s products."

There is more detail in the article. A PDF copy can be dowloaded here.