Will's Web Watch: Blogging (Part II)

And therein lies another issue. Companies must decide how formal they want to make their blog. Will it be part of an in-house comms strategy - an approach which might make it slightly dry, given the red tape which binds some companies, or will it be a free-for-all which throws up the chance of causing both accidental and malicious damage?

A close friend of mine from the PR industry isn't convinced that the formal approach is one companies should consider.

"Too many corporate blogs have become just another marketing tool, bylined to the management but inevitably written by the marketing team," he told me recently.

"For those that can see through this and weed out those that aren't genuine, they'll remain valuable. For those that can't, scepticism and cynicism will probably creep in, rendering them all useless."

And that uncertainty is hard to overcome.

Some companies appear happy to abdicate responsibility to the masses. Microsoft, for example, is a company which encourages all its employees to run blogs that can deal, though not exclusively, with corporate issues.

According to one blogger within the senior management team at Microsoft there is an 'anything goes' policy which to date has thrown up very few issues.

But whether it's an official corporate blog, hosted on the company's website, or a personal blog run by an employee, more and more companies are realising the need for a blogging policy included alongside other HR issues, such as email and internet use.

Companies must define clearly what can be said and what can't. The corporate blog certainly represents a legal minefield and there is a fine line between a news update and an unwanted leak.

Many companies may like the idea of running a blog but the enthusiasm would wane pretty quickly if somebody within the company posted plans which handed competitive advantage to a rival.

But simply keeping the postings trite is also no alternative. It might limit the risk of anything being said which could prove contentious but it also greatly reduces the risk of the blog being at all interesting. There are some blogs out there that would make for a fairly dull message board on a company intranet - but to share such aimless musings with the wider world is unforgivable.

The only real given here is that over the coming year we can expect to see a great many more companies jump onto the blogging bandwagon, and you can guarantee there will be some successes and doubtless spectacular failures.

I would urge companies to do all they can to ensure they aren't one of the latter because blogs offer up the threat of a very public and very immediate shaming for those companies who trip themselves up - not to mention writing great copy for their rivals' blogs.