The risk of becoming conservative

No I am not talking about politics. I am talking about the increasing sense I have had over the past few months that "stating the obvious" is becoming harder. Some of you may have noticed that I have been blogging less over the past few months and there are a number of reasons for this.

Part of it is that working with the clients I do I don't always feel I can write about my work. Not that any of it is secret, but I feel sensitive to their right to choose when and how our work is made public. Secondly I have been blogging for eight years and there is this feeling, that continues to grow that, I have already written about most things - at least once!

The last reason is possibly the most concerning and the main prompt for this post. I feel more watched than ever before. I don't get vast numbers of readers for this blog but the ones I do tend to be smart, vocal and influential. As a result I get more and more concerned about what "they" will think. Will they think I am stupid, will they think I have lost my touch, will they think I have lost my relevance?

Risk is one of the main inhibitors to blogging, especially in a corporate environment. All those voices that you imagine saying things like "Who are you to say that?" or even "Who am I to say that?" or as an older relative of mine once said "Oh yes - blogging - that's just people expressing their opinions" - get ever louder and more difficult to ignore. Giving in to these sorts of risks though is why people stop saying what they think - and sometimes even stop thinking! It becomes easier just to stay quiet and let things pass you by.

Well, it may or may not come as a relief to you, dear reader, to know that I am going to resist these pressures and renew my efforts to state the obvious and continue to fill this blog with the inane burbling you have come to expect!

Blogging Guidelines

There comes a time in any organisation's use of blogging, and for that matter other social media tools as well, when someone feels the need of a line in the sand. A blog post from James Dellow at Headshift Australia brought back my own "line in the sand" moment at the BBC, the moment when having some "official" view from the organisation about this new field of staff activity felt like a good thing to do.

The thing is, a blogging policy can range from "Don't be stupid" to a multi-page legal document with every possible variation in between. The document says at least as much about the people writing it as it does about the people it will affect. The neat trick we pulled off at the BBC was to make them largely one and the same thing. We encouraged collective responsibility from the start. It wasn't one group of people telling another group of people how to behave. Attempting to do so rarely works in online environments and indeed government legislation often falls prey to this. One group, who have status and power and feel the need to control, writing legislation intended to apply to a sphere of influence and activity of which they have little or no experience.

The thing to remember is that bad laws are hard to enforce while good rules pretty much enforce themselves. There are loads of different examples of blogging policies out there that you can learn from but make sure you don't just copy and paste or worse still fall into the trap of letting someone else write yours!