Mairay Mutabiq – Corporate Blogging in Pakistan

As trend of people towards blogging and forum posting has been growing rapidly and we see how people are sharing many important things about their services and products via this network of blogs and forums – Pakistan has also been making progress day by day in IT field, particularly the online media and blogging.

We have seen employees of the organizations, especially from Telecom & IT sector, busy in sharing information with each other over internet through blogs and forums.

In recent times, we have observed numerous bloggers who are aggressively pursuing the negative criticism on blogs by responding such criticism on due time. It has been reported in some blogs that IT companies in Pakistan are hiring bloggers to write for them. Companies want to show their bright side to the people on cyber medium. That’s Ok!! But the problem begins where the employees don’t know the basics of blogging and they publish posts on blogs without keeping in mind that this may have negative impacts upon the image of the company. So, there must be some policies & some guidelines, issued to the employees in this context.

Some of the popular policies can be as following:

1. This should be MAIRAY MUTABIQ (My Views) and not UNN KAY MUTABIQ (Their Views). Meaning that blogger should write according to his own will without considering the priorities of the companies and if possible, mention disclaimer.
2. If somehow company allows MAIRAY MUTABIQ, then this should be under company rules and regulations. Meaning that all the thoughts which are being portrayed on blog must follow company rule book i.e. No leakage of company sensitive information, no obscene content and asking PR people first if you don’t know the specific answer.
3. Blog post shouldn’t attack on competitor’s services and products. The bloggers should avoid inflammatory subjects and critical assaults on personalities.

Robert Scoble who co-wrote “Naked Conversations”, mentioned in corporate blogging policies section for companies…. “Don’t buy that nonsense about needing to have “conversations” with the marketplace. That’s an ideology, not a strategy.”