The new job description

20 July 2005

Tim Bray looks forward to an era where blogging will create a “new public relations”, where senior managers teach employees their companies’ “goals and messages”, and regular employees, not just PR specialists, spread them to everyone else who cares to read about them.

Bray assures managers that this new system would not make them look bad, unless their organization is so dysfunctional that griping in blogs is the least of their problems. What I wonder is: will this make employees look bad? Will an employee with a widely-read blog get a better performance evaluation, on the grounds that the blog creates positive buzz for the company? Will insecure parents not only read their nannies’ blogs, but demand that charming anecdotes about their children be posted there?

How long until some poor soul discovers that he or she has been fired for not blogging enough?

• Later: The Goldstein Question
• Earlier: Acknowledgements