Corporate blogs offer opportunities & challenges : Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith

Brad Smith, General Counsel for Microsoft, writing for InsideCounsel Magazine, shares some insight into the opportunities blogs and social media offer corporate heads.

New Internet and communications technologies continue to change our daily lives. It’s possible today to switch easily between e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, blogging and social networking sites.

Teenagers simply use all of these at the same time! But for those who are a bit older, the impact of new technologies is profound. For in-house counsel, it is becoming increasingly important to think about both the challenges and opportunities these changes create.

When it comes to employees blogging (Microsoft has 1,500) Smith advises providing guidance on how to blog legally with a focus on existing company policy.

The goal [for Microsoft] was not to devise entirely new policies for blogging, but to help employees apply existing standards on confidentiality and business conduct in this new online environment. It was important to provide this advice in a form that employee bloggers would find natural and useful—namely, a list of frequently asked questions and best practices posted on an internal ‘blog for bloggers.’

Beyond employee blogs Smith offers other potential uses for corporate blogs:

• Medium for sharing information with employees.
• Make broad communication with employees a two-way street.
• Legal statements from companies not in the form of a traditional press release, but as less formal blog postings.

As to whether the corporate legal department should have a blog and what it should offer, Smith says ‘A decade from now these questions may well seem like old hat.’