In his June 30 post Andrew McAfee, the man who coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" wrote down a kind of FAQ list  - a list of questions that regularly pop up when discussing social media in the enterprise.

I immediately recognized the type of questions as I regularly get them from clients and people attending conferences I speak at. So I thought it would be a good idea to answer them here, one by one...

So let's start with number one:

What if employees use their internal blogs to post hate speech or pornography, or to harass a co-worker?

Well, if your employees are using internal blogs to do so then you have a serious issue with your "business conduct guidelines" or "corporate values".

The fact that employees think they can do this has much more to do with the kind of people you hire than with anything else.

Of course, if this happens, you should immediately act according to your company policy and take appropriate actions.

But the first thing to do is to make certain you have blogging guidelines in place.

Every company which uses social media within the enterprise should have social media guidelines. They should be signed off by the legal department, understood by internal communications, by HR and by the employees.

You should dedicate time and resources to make the guidelines understood by everyone in the company. Not only for the sake of the corporation but also to protect your employees.

If you don't have these guidelines today then creating them is a priority. Chances are you already have bloggers in the company, why not ask for their input ?

When I was working at IBM, we decided to create an internal wiki, open it up to our employees and in 2 weeks we had received enough input to start drafting the - by now famous - IBM Blogging Guidelines.

Education & communications are key and there is no excuse for not having these guidelines developed.

There are enough good examples out there and if you are not certain here to start... don't hesitate to give me a call.

Next week I'll take on another question from the list.

mcafee, enterprise2.0, guidelines, ibm, internal, social media, blogging, questions, FAQ