Blogging can help or hurt your career

Blogging has become an impulsive contemporary art for careerists. Should you develop your own blog or shouldn’t you? Will it help or hurt your career?

What’s easy can be fun or dangerous. In a matter of minutes, you can set up your Blogger, WordPress, Typepad or related blog site. And the minute you post? Your words can be accessed by billions of people around the world. No Web designer needs to be hired. No technical guru at x dollars an hour has to listen to and potentially kill your ideas. You own this medium. You have freedom. You can say or cite anything. There’s no waste of time and no need to white-board everyone else’s ideas.

How it can help:

1. You have an audience. Keep it positive. Blogging may add to the company’s brand and your position as an authority or subject matter expert within your company or your field so take note of what you put on the internet.

2. Maintain a positive spin. Drive customer confidence. As you cite critical sources and make intelligent, important observations, your personal blog augments your position within your company and promotes your company. You never bash your company. You can be yourself and be authentic.

Get a raise and a promotion. Defend the faith. Blogging helps you document and publish your ideas while associating with great people.

How blogs can hurt:

1. Negative posts can be fatal. Blogging can open you up for many legal, liability and employment questions, problems or crises.

2. Pictures tell a thousand stories. For an example “Larry” seemed to pipe up at work a lot about things that bothered him. So he decided to publish a seemingly anonymous blog. As a techy he posted hundreds of comments on political ideas, named people he thought should be impeached and railed against what he considered bad taste and fashion. He did this anonymously under a lot of different names. But when he decided to take pictures at the year-end Christmas party and publish captions that offended nearly everyone, he was, well, suspended without pay forever (fired).

3. Beautiful art can be destroyed. Knowing that having no blog presence can leave a company vulnerable, it is increasingly interesting and titillating to add negative comments to company products; to dump a list of customer complaints onto the proverbial, anonymous IHATEXCOMPANY.com, the site a former employee developed to stick it to the man. Under pressure, the IHATEXCOMPANY.com author faced legal entanglements and gave up Craig’s name as a blogger.

Today, with more and more recruiters and employers going online, it is important to keep a positive online image. Weigh the pros and cons of starting a blog and then if you do chose to continue, be sure that anything you put up would be something you are proud to have in your ‘digital footprint’.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 7:37 am and is filed under Blog, Career, Job Search, Referrals/Testimonials, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.