One of the most powerful aspects of social media is the ability for the people inside your company to connect with the people outside your company.

Social media, at its best, is transparent and authentic. One of the most common and effective ways to do this is to allow your experts, your talented personalities demonstrate their expertise through a blog.

This is a great way to add a human side to your company.  Many of the early successes are based on personality bloggers. Robert Scoble at Microsoft is a classic example. Famous CEO blogger Jonathan Schwartz is another one.

What’s worse than loosing your good employees?

Keeping the bad ones.

One of the challenges I’ve had to deal with at HP lately is, what do you do when one of your personalities leave? Just last year 3 of our top 5 bloggers where Vince Ferraro and the LaserJet Blog, Eric Kintz’s Digital Mindset Blog and Stan Garfield’s Weekly Knowledge Management Blog.

Recently all three bloggers have left HP. Vince retired while Eric and Stan moved on to other companies.

Vince was the first to leave and it was at that time that we had to decide what we would do with their blogs. Our Core Community Team met and ultimately decided on what we felt were three ideal options.

1. If the group within HP wanted to keep the topic of the blog going another expert could step in and take over the blog, continuing along the same topic. The blog could also be turned into a group blog with multiple bloggers taking on the task.
2. If the blog were still recently new and did not have significant traffic (that decision would be made on a case by case basis) , the blog would just be deleted. This also works for bloggers who fail to keep up a blog even though they haven’t left the company.
3. If the blog was popular enough then the blog would be closed, comments would be turned off and the blog would be left up for archival purposes. Ideally each blogger would leave one final post explaining the situation. If the blogger left the company before doing this, someone else could step in and make the final post.

In the case of Stan and Vince they each left one final post. In Eric’s case he left before doing this so I went in and left the final post.

It’s always tough to loose talented people. It’s especially tough when those people are publicly facing. I remember when Robert left Microsoft, people were actually predicting the demise of Microsoft. That obviously didn’t happen. Robert and Microsoft have both done just fine on their own.

So far this has worked out for us. Has anyone else had this experience yet? How have you dealt with it?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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