Blogging for Directors

After a recent comment on my blog by Paul from ITWeb and an IOD presentation I attended, I was interested in what you should and should not be blogging about as the director of a company.

The basics:

As a basic principle a director has a fiduciary duty to the company and the shareholders. This boils down to: you must act in the best interests of the company and shareholders when acting as a director. This would certainly extend to the release of confidential information without proper authorisation. It all becomes much more serious when a company becomes public / widely-held.

So you have to ask yourself.. is the information public knowledge and could it harm the business? Would the other directors of the business he happy with the information you publish?

I found this interesting:

..the information in a blog can be considered to be of an uneven distribution and therefore could be considered prejudicial to others who would not normally find it.

I guess it makes sense, but.. truth is free, information costs.. you have to work at finding relevant information. I don’t see how people can expect to be guaranteed to be made aware of information which is freely available.

When I blog about the ventures I’m involved with I most definitely do not want to be the official voice with the clean clinical PR message.. nobody wants to read that. I think people like a more fun, personal and subjective view and a story.

Often I can’t share all the facts, but I’m betting it’s the story you remember more than the facts.