I’ve been keeping what amounts to a blog since 1997 in one form or another, but up until starting this blog had always kept my writings more on the personal level. I had brought up ideas or problems I had run into, but always kept a very personal and sometimes adversarial tone to topics. I realized that you cannot run a blog that tries to spread over very personal issues to those that are very business or technically oriented, and had wanted to write a more professional and business focused blog for a while.

Within the past six months or so I have become much more deeply involved in reading blogs of other people that cover the topics I am most interested in, and been utilizing technologies like Google Reader to limit the impact to my time. There are numerous blogs that I read that I truly enjoy, and cover a great number of topics to me, and some are written by people that have achieved success that I truly hope to emulate as I grow in my business.

Most of these blogs are either direct official company blogs, or the blog of the owner intending to spread the word about his company through social media. Every once in a great while though, I find things passing onto the web from one of these blogs that just really bothers me. One blog of a local technology company that I read, more for keeping up on the competition than anything, had a new employee post the following on their blog:

You could say I’m new here. Its certainly better then the battle zone I worked in before …

Frankly I’m still amazed that this post is still sitting on their website. No matter who the former employer happened to be, this is in my humble opinion completely unacceptable on an official company blog, and frankly I’d have had words with my employee as well as immediately removing that post from the blog.

I think some people have become too familiar with the environment surrounding social media and sometimes forget that they could have potential clients reading their blog, and if you are willing to say something that bad about a company publicly, think of what they might believe you are saying once the door closes. Remember, anyone can read what you posted, and with sites like Archive.org, it could last forever.