For the uninitiated, a blog is an online journal, or Weblog, that contains thoughts, opinions, reflections, insights, and commentary from an organization or individual operator.

For employers challenged by workplace E-mail and instant- messaging management, blogs pose new and potentially costly risks. Unmanaged Weblogs put your company’s assets, reputation, and future at risk. Without strategic blog-related rules, policies, and procedures, employers face the loss of confidential information and intellectual property, negative publicity, public embarrassment, workplace lawsuits, and lost productivity, among other potential disasters.

To help avert blog-related problems, The ePolicy Institute offers three critical rules to help CIOs effectively manage and monitor employees’ blog use. While these rules relate equally to E-mail and instant messaging, blogs present their own challenges to CIOs.

Rule 1: Establish a written policy governing your company’s corporate blog. If you operate a corporate blog on which employees are free to post commentary, you must establish and enforce clear rules governing language and other content. Use your written policy to make sure employees know what type of language and content is are allowed and what' is banned from the company blog. Remind employees that blog content must be in compliance the company’s harassment and discrimination policies.

To help prevent smoking-gun blog content from triggering a workplace lawsuit, stock slide, or media feeding frenzy, prohibit employees from posting negative opinions or critical comments about the company’s people, products, and services.

Rule 2: Guard your professional and personal secrets. Protect your company’s intellectual property and your employees’ privacy by enforcing rules governing the posting of confidential information. Do not let bloggers to post any content that could embarrass or otherwise harm the company and its executives, employees, clients, and suppliers.

Support your blog policy with training designed to educate employees about confidentiality, copyright, and privacy, among other issues. Make sure employees understand what information the company classifies as confidential, and what penalties—up to and including termination—await policy violators.

Rule 3: Establish a written policy governing employees’ personal blog use. Make sure employees understand that all of the company’s written rules and policies apply, whether they' are operating personal blogs from their cubicles at work or their bedrooms at home.

If you allow personal blogging from office computers, notify employees that the computer system is the property of the company, and employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using it to operate a personal blog. Instruct employees who blog outside the office that they' are prohibited from discussing the company, employees, and clients; posting company-related content; using the organization’s logo and copyright-protected material; and violating the organization’s blog rules and other policies.

Nancy Flynn is founder and executive director of The ePolicy Institute, and author of Instant Messaging Rules (Amacom Books, 2004) and E-Mail Rules (Amacom Books, 2003).