Career blogging

Interesting thoughts yesterday from Podtech’s (and soon a Forrester analyst, congrats!) Jeremiah Owyang about “career blogging.”

“The Career Blog is a unique property, it’s a mixture of work, personal, yet all passion. It travels from one job to the next, and can be one of the attractions for clients, employers, and partners. Balancing the needs of those many constituents is a challenge.”

None of this is new but the lights came on for me. As I try to introduce the concept of blogging and social media to a few colleagues the term career blogging solves a lot of issues for me in explaining how encouraging our employees to blog could benefit our brand (it took me 2 minutes to write that phrase…proof that I’m still finding it tough to explain). It’s a heck of a lot more accurate than “corporate blogging” or “professional blogging” or worse, “personal blogging.”

As I explore the different options for our own social media strategy, I always find myself with the same questions and most of them relate to the separation of our corporate brand and our employees’ personal brands.

Being in the service industry that’s quite impossible. To over-simplify things, with a physical product most consumers really couldn’t care less about who assembled it as long as it works. Not so in the service industry. The people who provide the service can make or break the brand. I can pepper my blog with disclaimers everywhere that what I say here does not reflect the official policies of my employer to protect them in court should there be a need for it, but no disclaimer can stop a client or prospect from judging my employer based on what they see here.

The individual is a reflection of the brand and vice versa. Employers invest heavily in training and continuing education for their employees and make sure they are well versed in their respective industries because of this. What better way to take that investment further than encouraging their employees to showcase that knowledge and expertise through career blogging.

Keeping employees’ individual brands separate from their employers’ corporate brands beyond the necessary legal disclaimers is a futile effort especially in the service industry (doing Google search of the employee’s name and count how many times the employer’s name shows up will demonstrate this). Corporations who realize this are going to be ahead of the game as the personal/professional line blurs even more as Facebook opens up to search engines.