At company meetings and email discussions, we realized that we had many opinions and ideas that we simply kept to ourselves. Therefore, TCG has decided to open a corporate blog so that we could share our thoughts on our areas of business:
- Science research related IT
- Grants Management
- Government IT
As CTO of a small business, it fell upon me to answer the following questions:
- Should we host the site or have it hosted, and where?
- How should the site be organized?
- What will our blogging policies be?
As with almost any new question, I turned to my colleagues and the Web for possible solutions. Since bloggers are by nature prolific writers, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the volume of opinions and data available. But it truly is vast.
While TCG hosts our own Web, mail, CVS, backup, and other servers, it turns out that using a blogging host for many months is cheaper than setting up our own blogging server (even considering open source servers). In addition, people seem to like Typepad and the Movable Type platform upon which it is based. So to mitigate the risk and cost, we went with Typepad. A great comparison of blogging server software is on Asymptomatic.
With our blogging solution chosen and a discussion of how the site was to be run (in order to keep a high publishing rate, we decided to start with everyone in our small company posting to a single blog), it was time to examine our blogging policy. Of course, we had none. As it turns out, an excellent review of eight different company policies is on CorporateBlogging.info. By combining Fredrik’s “Core” and “Common” rules we arrive at a draft skeleton of the TCG Blogging Policy:
- You’re personally responsible
- Abide by existing rules
- Keep secrets
- Be nice
- Add value
- Follow the law
- Respect copyright
- Cite and link
- Discuss with your manager
And thus, a new corporate blog is born…