Organisations: who should and shouldn't blog

Allowing individual people within a company to write their public opinions or work flow can be beneficial to their organisation. The public get to see what goes on and could inspire the next generation workforce to be a part of that team. However, in some cases, it doesn't work as well as the organisations think.

Apple, quite famous for being tight-lipped about any internal going's on, to the point where secrecy is so rife, the separate hardware and software teams working on the iPhone had no idea about the other and didn't quite know what the end product was.

Microsoft allow blogging, so much to say they encourage it. But to do so, they need internal policies to ensure nothing gets let slip before it should, and that certain views are not expressed which may well be offensive to others. Fair enough really; the last thing you be need is a PR disaster from a supremacist blogger spouting off personal opinions on a corporate blog.

But in some organisations which security and a tight-lipped nature being one of those in the job description, it can not only lead to the potential downfall of the employee, the organisation they represent, but the people they help protect.

I'm talking about a police force, and a detective-constable serving with a local UK police service who criticised bureaucracy, procedures and policy under a psudonym.

His blog, hosted on Wordpress until it was shut down due to the High Court decision not to protect his identity anymore.

But with potentially sensitive information and criticisms of important officials on show to the public, it isn't just damaging to the person potentially, but to the police force and the perception of the people that protect the community.

Should employers state in contracts modern day equivalents to corporate right to privacy, or should anyone working with an organisation be entitled to an opinion without the risk of losing their jobs?