At First Light

John Eckman of Optaros has raised an interesting set of questions about how to blend corporate blogging with personal blogging. His post is building off of another post by Chris Brogan on the topic.

In John’s words:

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

• Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC
  client to automate that process.
• Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
• Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places - most recently my review of Groundswell - and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized >messages for each appropriate channel - valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience - but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs - which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

At Acquia we’ve been dealing with this issue since inception. Several employees, myself included, have personal blogs where they post about work and non-work topics. Additionally, all employees have a blog on Acquia.com. We want our company to be conversational and personal and accessble, and authentic blogging is a great way to achieve that.

We use a combination of tag-based syndication and common sense rules to deal with the issue of what goes where. It all starts with what the post is about and who would be interested in reading it.

• If the post is about Acquia products, service, customers, partners, community, strategy, marketing, sales, industry trends, etc., then it should probably appear on Acquia.com.
• If the author of the above described post has a separate personal blog and wants to have the post described above appear on their personal blog, then they should post it there, tag it with “acquia” and then we’ll syndicate the post onto Acquia.com.
• If the author of the post has a personal blog, but doesn’t want to have the post described above appear on their personal blog, then they should just post it on Acquia.com.
• If the post is unrelated to Acquia then it should appear on the personal blog only
• If the post is something that will be interesting to the entire Drupal community, then it should be tagged with “drupal planet” and that will ensure that it is syndicated to the Drupal Planet aggregated feed of Drupal community blogs. It’s a no-no to tag the same post with Drupal Planet in both places, creating duplicate entries in the Planet feed, so we usually apply this tag only after the syndication has taken place. I am sure there is a more elegant solution to this, but we don’t have it in place yet. The cobblers children problem.

The thing we don’t yet have figured out is where the comments for posts that appear in two place should live. At the moment, if something is syndicated to Acquia.com from a personal blog, comments could appear in both places. This risks fragmenting the discussion, which is probably not a good thing.

I’m interested to hear from others what they are doing. Intertwining our personal online lives with our work online lives is a double edged sword, and we need to learn how to handle it properly. We all seem to be feeling our way.