Emailing the CIO

Our new CIO responded to my request for help with blogging guidelines. It's great to have a perspective from elsewhere - he's been working in the States for years.

One of his points was that many of the most successful blogs are set up to meet a short-term need, perhaps over a few days or weeks. That's probably something which would only work in a corporate environment where people know about each other. No-one would know about an internet blog which came and went in a week.

The other point is that it has to be as quick to set up an internal blog as it is to create one on Blogger or Wordpress. That's not the case at the moment. Even duplicating an existing blog takes a couple of working days, which is very scary.

It was great to hear back from another blogger, director of customer experience in one of the UK divisions. He said he felt really concerned when he got my email that it meant the end of carefree blogging in the organisation... but in fact he felt my guidelines were good and really helpful. :-)

Now the hard bit will be to stop HR turning them into a set of rules and banning everyone from using Facebook.