Cisco blogger John Earnhardt is wondering if the of network gear should do more blogging. Earnhardt is a senior manager of policy communications for Cisco's Worldwide Government Affair Group (simply put, he's in public relations).

He proudly proclaims that the company has "a handful of blogs", and points to event driven blogs and concludes that Cisco is doing "a decent job of giving some flavor of what we are interested in."

27 Apr 2007

Earnhardt however must be doubting that statement (thank goodness!), because he continues his blog posting questioning if the company should open up more. If it should, for instance, provide a blogging platform for all its employees.

The answer to that question can only be a resounding: Duh! I can't believe that companies are even asking that question in 2007.

If you're restricting what your employees blog about, you're essentially saying that you don't trust them. But don't you also trust that they won't harm the company when they talk about it during the weekend and at night when they aren't at work?

Of course things will go wrong. Employees will make stupid mistakes and they will write things that might make you decide to fire those employees. But again, wouldn't that employee be making the same comments in public before? Blogs just do a better job at exposing those people, but it doesn't turn your number one workers into a secret exposing devil.

What exactly is Cisco afraid of? That its carefully crafted PR strategy is undercut by Cisco employees giving honest facts? Doesn't that say more about the (perceived) honesty in your PR strategy than it does about your employees?

Cisco coined the phrase "the participation age", but for some reason Earnhardt claims that for Cisco is enough to just talk and not participate.