metaViper

The advent of blogging has created an immense opportunity for traditional companies in the form of free buzz. It’s a way for corporate decision makers to connect directly with their employees and customers with casual dialog. Of course, the expectation is that when people share their opinions a company will take action based on their feedback.

One way to work through this without the same level of expectation is by encouraging employee blogging. This will help build a good online presence especially if employees are happy where they work. However, if negative blog posts are surfacing about your company that’s an indication there are internal problems in need of quick attention.

Essentially, blogging holds a company accountable to the public. Treat employees and customers fairly and this will work positively.

That said, it’s important to give would-be bloggers a few tips, which essentially become the company’s blogging policy. The points below are written from the perspective of an employer, please feel free to copy and modify them to fit your needs.

Are there important points I’m missing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Blogging Policy Template:

Many people participate in blogging for business and pleasure. metaViper recognizes that your time outside of work is your own and that topics you choose to blog about during that time are independent of company domain. That in mind, we would like to recommend a few good practices:

1. If you identify yourself as an employee of metaViper it’s important to distinguish your opinion from the company’s.
2. Blogging about metaViper is encouraged with the first premise in mind.
3. In fact, here are a few things you might be interested in blogging about: metaViper’s focus on quality content, our relaxed culture that encourages diverse and collaborative independence, or some of our most recent articles.
4. Personal blogging at work shouldn’t interfere with your job. Microbreaks are important but make sure your work gets done.
5. Information posted to the blogosphere is public and will be accessible for years as part of your online breadcrumb. Remember this when sharing your opinions.
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Text is great. It’s one of the technologies that our species has used stretching into antiquity with the advent of the alphabet. It enables one human to express meaning to another human with a sense of permanence, and with boundaries limited only by the imagination.

Even so, sometimes an image conveys meaning more quickly than writing an entire paragraph or even pages of text. Creating a pleasant visual flow is part of good design and adding images helps do this by encouraging a shift in how the eye greets the screen.

That in mind, where can we find high quality images that add to the quality of a well designed web presence? I suggest visiting YotoPhoto. It’s an image search engine that provides results in the creative commons licensing space. That means the creator has granted use of his or her images as long as they aren’t a primary profit driver. YotoPhoto searches Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto all at once and provides aggregated results as linked thumbnails.

It’s also possible to search for a specific hexadecimal color using YotoPhoto. So if you’re looking for a bright green colored car, head to the advanced search page and search for car and to the lower right use color 00ff00. It’s a great way to work within color schemes and pump up how creative your pages look.