Earlier this week, at the SNCR Research Symposium in Boston, I moderated a panel discussion on corporate blogging policies. A big thanks to Christopher Barger/IBM, Charlie Bess/EDS and John Cass/Research Fellow, for sharing their collective insights and anecdotes– clearly this remains a hot topic for many companies.

I think one of the reasons this remains a hot topic, and we touched on this, is that a writable web presents an constant set of new headaches, I mean challenges, for companies. As a result, the best corporate blogging policies are those that can be applied and enforced across a mix of new mediums and usage scenarios–not just blogs. The reality is that participation online takes a lot of different forms, each with its own risks and rewards.

John Cass shared a classic example with the GCI intern-gone-bannanas comment catastrophe (read more here). But we’ve also heard about employees gaming sites like Digg and del.ici.us, as well as uploading problematic videos and images to sites like YouTube and Flickr, and of course meddling with history via community tools like Wikipedia.

More often than not, intentions are good but the outcome is always, always bad for the company, so the language for corporate policies and guidelines for online conduct should be broad enough to cover multiple forms of participation. They should also be flexible enough to encompass new technologies and tools, as needed.

In time, it’s my hope that we’ll stop calling these corporate blogging policies, and instead what they really are: social media policies.

/Mike Manuel

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