Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Chris’s post focuses on “trust agents” who have a personal presence in a given community but also represent a company, and raises the issue of what happens when they move on to another company. Some folks blog on the corporate site, with the company for which they work providing the platform. His own situation?:

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

At Optaros, we’ve always tried to encourage consultants to maintain a presence in various communities on their own, independent of the corporate platform. We’ve never wanted to project a kind of “corporate voice” that is impersonal and anonymous, and having people speak in their own voices on their own platforms helps project a more authentic, created-by-real-people-working set of voices in the communities with which we interact.

In addition to encouraging external blogs, we also started supporting blogging on the corporate site when it relaunched in early 2008 and on the Enterprise Open Source Directory, which Optaros sponsors.

It’s an extension of the same logic – kill the bland, anonymous corporate voice in favor of real personalities who write in their own voice about subjects with which they have deep experience – with a minor change in that we’re using the corporate platform. Optaros’ VP of Marketing Marc Osofsky describes the approach in a blog post: What is a Web 2.0 Corporate Website?.

(We did consider simply aggregating content from the external blogs of Optaros employees, but providing our own platform creates new opportunities for employees who don’t maintain external blogs, and creating quality content directly seemed a better long term strategy than simple aggregation).

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

1. Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC client to automate that process.
2. Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
3. Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places – most recently my review of Groundswell – and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized messages for each appropriate channel – valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience – but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs – which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

(I also bring all three together by reference at JohnEckman.com which is an aggregated lifestream – but that’s likely too much me for anyone to really subscribe to).

The easiest solution is to just cross-post, but somehow, honestly, that just feels not-quite-right to me, at least as a constant stream. Not everything I write on Open Parenthesis makes sense on Optaros.com, and vice-versa. Maybe the only real solution is to continue to muddle along, choosing each time based on what I’m writing about whether it belongs on my Optaros.com blog, here on Open Parenthesis, and/or on the Enterprise Open Source Directory blog, and whether full copies or references make sense.

Who would you hold up as successful examples of blogging on and off the corporate domain?

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.

Participating on the panel with me will be:

• Bob Bickel, Founder and CEO of Ringside Networks
• Dr. Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia

Thanks to the conference organizers, I have one free full conference pass to give away. (Full conference pass is $1895 currently and $2095 if you register on site).

To get the pass, contact me. I will choose at random from those who contact me by the end of day Sunday, 5/11.

I also have a number of discount codes which you can use to get a free demo pavillion pass – which gets you in to the demo pavillion as well as “selected keynotes and sponsored sessions” – or $100 off a full registration.