Today we've been live blogging the European Transport Forum here in Brussels.

This 3 day conference discusses integrated vehicle safety, cutting CO2 emissions, and urban mobility and is an initiative to create an open platform to debate transport related issues in Europe.

Both my colleague and I are blogging the conference as it happens.

Pieter takes notes there and then while I run around an take video coverage and/or take pictures so we can re-create some of the atmosphere of the event.

I have blogged about the advantages of live blogging conferences and events before and must say it is still a very underused approach to marketing and business communications.

Our client, the European Transport Forum, clearly understand the value of this approach;

• content archived online & ready for re-use,
  
• direct feedback from online audiences,
  
• the ability to replay conference coverage and of course the fact that
  
• all this content can be syndicated to other websites, blogs etc...

We also created a separate YouTube channel to host the videos we shot and are ready to live blog the second day tomorrow.

If you are interested in transport, logistics etc... please follow us online and don't hesitate to comment and/or interact. It is all possible through the live blog service.

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

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