Employee Blogging

Potential Problems for Employers

Employers may face a number of adverse consequences as a result of their employees' blogging. The most obvious of these problems is decreased productivity from current employees who blog on company time when they should be working. Arguably more significant, however, are the following potential problems resulting from employee blogging:

• The intentional or inadvertent leaking of confidential, proprietary or other sensitive company information or trade secrets;
• Defamatory and/or libelous postings;
• Offensive, harassing or otherwise inappropriate postings; and
• Disparaging postings about the employer, its management, or its personnel (so-called “cyber smearing”).

While these potential problems may not necessarily be new issues for employers to address, the nature of Internet blogs greatly exacerbates these dangers. The traditional mechanism by which employees communicated was much more proscribed – ie, around the dinner table or over the proverbial water cooler. Even an e-mail message (which may produce an analogous problem for employers) normally requires the sender to input an addressee into the message, or affirmatively strike commands such as “reply to sender,” “forward,” or “reply to all” before the electronic message is able to be viewed by a third party. In the case of blogging, however, the messages are typically available for public viewing. More-over, blogs are searchable by potential and/or current employers long after they are posted, and may be found with relative ease via readily available search engines.