Blogging from the evil empire

It's not easy being Microsoft sometimes especially when people refer to the company as the evil empire.  Even Google who despite not having much care for people's intellectual property rights, market themselves under the "don't do evil" slogan.  For the 70000 of us that work at Microsoft, who have to take this kind of abuse, we don't think of ourselves as evil.  Quite the opposite, in fact, rather we put our creative energies to work every day to create the software that will change evil empirethe world.  Maybe that's why 4500 of us choose to blog, often in our own time.  It's time we stopped letting our competitors tar us with whatever brush they feel like.  Blogging is a way that we are able to personally do that.

I'm on Reuters TV talking about this today, following on from the blogging4business event the other week.

Putting a face to a faceless organisation through blogs changes the way people perceive our company.  You might have all kinds of media-incited perceptions of our brand but when you meet us, you find we are actually quite nice people.

There are some very dedicated bloggers at Microsoft and we have incredible freedom to write as we see fit.  There are no set in stone policies we must comply with - just sensible advice on how to be a better blogger.  All of us marshall all manner of confidential information all day and the company trusts bluemonsterus to apply the same common sense to our blogs as we do in any other communication.  It also tolerates us being critical of the company from time to time because it helps us improve.

I am really enjoying the evolution of the bluemonster story and the constant reminder and good example Steve Clayton (left) is to me on how to blog properly.  It's about conversation, it's about dialogue, it's about us telling our story.  Listen to Steve tell the story on youtube.