Given that everyone is a media company...

The BBC has released some new guidelines for its staff on social networks, blogging, Wikipedia and generally maintaining the reputation of the corporation as they go about their digital lives. (HT: David Black.)

It's an excellent document and, increasingly, something every company or organisation is going to need. (Look at the problems faced by Waterstones, the DWP and even the CIA when they found to their amazement bloggers in their midst.)

Corporate responses to the phenomenon of social media are by no means straightforward. It should be obvious by now, for example, that any organisation proposing a blanket rule "no-one who works here is allowed to blog" will either cut off that organisation's access to digital natives or simply find the rule flouted, ignored and worked around. Social networks are already so embedded in the social activities and lives of digital natives that functioning without them is simply impractical. But as the BBC's new policy  implicitly recognises, the challenge this poses for media companies is at least superficially different than for other sorts of organisation. A media company's product is content. Its brand and its reputation are content. Having its employees engage in incidental content-production activities of their own seems to throw up all sorts of problems unique to the business of media.

The uniqueness of the problem for media companies is, at least partly, illusory. In chapter four of the brilliant Here Comes Everybody (not read it yet? Really, do) Clay Shirky points out that much of the confusion we face in contextualising blogging and other so-called "user generated content" comes from misunderstanding the grey area that the Internet has created between broadcast and communications media. Clay writes

    "Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It's also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall and picking out clothes...And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing - why would anyone put such drivel out in public?
    It's simple. They're not talking to you."

And later in the chapter

    "The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and an impersonal message just by the type of medium used...
    ...Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we're so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people's phone calls, we'd know to expect small-talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people's phone calls aren't out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user-generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to social cul-de-sacs like the phone."
(my emphasis, and I have slightly re-ordered the passage to make better sense isolated from the context of the rest of the book)   

In other words - while companies have plenty of bloggers explicitly broadcasting their personal take on their employers' industries, and while the media industry inevitably has more of its share than most, most blogs are not intended as broadcast at all. They are intended as diaries and aides-memoire, or for a circle of intimates not much wider than could be seated at a large table or reached in a series of phone calls. The reason organisations need a blogging policy is that those semi-private journals can become broadcast if someone outside that circle stumbles upon them, finds something potentially sensational therein and links them back to the organisation for which the author happens to work. Whatever our most earnest intentions, when we live online we live our lives in public and how we live reflects on our associates whether we intend it or not.

(Finally...to return for a moment to the BBC's new social media policy guidelines, it would be pure mischief on my part to suggest that a sentence in the section Political activities on social networking sites - specifically the sentence "if a  Political Correspondent were to join the Facebook group “Labour History” it may also be appropriate also to join “Conservative History” and the equivalents for the Liberal Democrats and the Nationalists" - could be construed as the BBC encouraging its employees to join groups supportive of the BNP. Still, it momentarily crossed my mind as a potentially amusing deliberate misconstrual, and I share that thought with you here, confident that it will merely amuse you too and that no-one would be malicious or foolish enough to take it anything other than frivolously.)