Other advice that I’d give is to have a good spam filter.

Not sure I understand. This post on China policy wasn’t signed with “Google Team” but Andrew McLaughlin. Perhaps you refer to another post, or an earlier version of that post.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html

But yes, I understand your point about allowing people who worked on something to announce the news. Not that that makes it any less official (think of Matt Cutts’ co-announcement of the “nofollow” initiative, which had *huge* industry impact), but it might make it nicer to read, of course, and it gives credit where credit is due.

> I’d say cut her some slack since with the attention
> she has received, I’m sure she’ll be reluctant to ever
> write anything with a point of view in the future. The
> same will likely extend to other corporate bloggers
> at the company.

Everybody should be allowed to post their opinions, and everybody else should be allowed to post their opinions in response to that, which is pretty much what happened. And instead of worrying about becoming shy due to that criticism, one should worry about how to work with the criticism to actually *change* things. And I don’t think making Lauren the scapegoat for any of this, or the sole responsible party for initiating that change, is fair for Google to do… I’m sure the Google employees working in ad sales pitches departments are trained to cater to their specific industries (and praised for aggressive pitches in every other context except a public blog post). So the problem is not Lauren, but overall strategy — *if* you consider this a problem, that is, like Danny Sullivan does, who says, “Google ought to get back to just selling space and not trying to be an ad agency to these groups. That’s what ad agencies do, and they aren’t hit by the burden of also having to run supposedly unbiased information resources.”

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You may have missed my point. Just because something was important to the person who signed the post, doesn’t mean it was solely their personal opinion. It was always our intent that the official (and at the time, only) Google blog reflect views consistent with the company’s perspective. However, we wanted to differentiate between company shovelware/PR info and something that was more directly related to an individual working on it.

We took flak for not signing our first couple of posts and wanted to let readers know that there were real people (i.e., non-marketing staff) writing about projects of importance to them. If you look at those early entries, you’ll see that signed posts were generally by the product manager/engineeer launching a new service or Charlie writing about his fried chicken recipe or Yoshka talking about being the top dog. Not terribly controversial stuff.

When we did take on something a bit meatier, such as our China policy, we signed it “The Google Team,” which was a last minute decision since it had been planned to release it under an executive’s name. The feeling was that we should make it clear it was a corporate post, not one person’s viewpoint on the topic.

I think Lauren’s post had problems for a few reasons already mentioned here, especially the blatant sales pitch at the end, but signing her name was the right thing to do. it let everyone know who was responsible and she acknowledged that responsibility by posting a clarification. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

I’d say cut her some slack since with the attention she has received, I’m sure she’ll be reluctant to ever write anything with a point of view in the future. The same will likely extend to other corporate bloggers at the company. Removing any and all opinions should really make Google’s blogs much more interesting to read, don’t you think?

-doug

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> When we post something that’s unsigned, it’s
> just general Google information that we think
> may be of interest to you. Apply whatever
> filter you deem appropriate. When something
> is signed by Larry or Sergey or another Googler,
> that’s really them talking about something
> important to them.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/05/whaddya-mean-we.html

As you signed that post on the Google blog with your name, would you consider it proper to consider this just your view point, and not Google’s? So that means the signed/ unsigned rule doesn’t exist on the official Google blog, it’s just one of your personal things you’d like?

By the same logic, would you consider the follow-up to the health issue just Missy Krasner personal opinion? So that means Google didn’t issue an official follow-up to Lauren’s post?

In short: I don’t think the signed/ unsigned rule works at all.

When Andrew McLaughlin talks about Google in China …
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html
… then that is by no means Andrew babbling along about his likes and dislikes, it’s *Google policy*, and should be understood (and reported) accordingly. It also has industry-wide implications which you can’t ignore which have nothing whatsoever to do with Andrew.

If someone posts on an official Google blog, using language like “we” and “Google”, and it turns out that it was just a little too much personal opinion which perhaps even opposed a company view point (or company communication strategy, even though Lauren’s post was reviewed before, as Google said), then fair enough, Google should post a clarification like they did. Then, reports can compare the two and adjust appropriately.