In his third post on employee blogging, John Sumser poses the case of an employee working for a company not in the wiener-dog industry, who writes a blog about wiener-dogs.
Then, one day a bully posts something nasty about my company and I respond. Or, my boss disciplines me and I spout off about it. Or legislation is proposed that inhibits my company and I write against it.... Or, or or.
In each of the aforementioned cases, I would have crossed the public-private divide.
Blogs are presented as something entirely new, but it's not like we've all been living Mr. and Mrs. Smith-style double-lives all along. As a character on the Drew Carey show once said, "Hate your job? There's a support group for that. It's called everyone and it meets every day after work at the bar." Having attended a meeting or two myself, I can attest to hearing all manner of scuttlebutt passed as freely as peanuts. That said, it's also long been understood that one shouldn't speak too openly about inside baseball. Around places like Wall Street where the walls really have ears, people have been dismissed for mouthing off since stock prices were read off ticker tapes.
The problem isn't with blogs so much as it is with Google, and in fact, I think John's wiener-dog analogy misses what are likely to be some of the thorniest cases. Imagine you interview a salesperson who shows up promptly and well-dressed and makes an excellent but otherwise unremarkable impression. Then for kicks, you type his name into Google. Next to the press release touting his hiring by the company you're about to poach him from, you find out that on weekends, he plays the part of Dr. Frank N Furter in Rocky Horror Picture Show reenactments at midnight showings of the film in a theater on the more bohemian side of town.
Ten or twenty years ago, a person could do this sort of thing, safe in the knowledge that aside from the people who show up for midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, no one would know how well you could sing this song. Or, engage in crackpot political activism of one stripe or another. Now all you need is the local alt-weekly paper to pick up on you, publish it online, and wham-o, the whole world knows all about you. For a long time, ZoomInfo actually had me as a writer for The Cannabis News, because they ganked one of my columns and published it on their website.
Companies have a reasonable expectation that employees will take reasonable precautions to not make them look bad. Employees have a reasonable expectation that there are limits to the things their employer has a right to an opinion about. This is where the old saying about an unstoppable force meets an immovable object kicks in.
