I talk a lot about how employees' blogs can affect your company's employment brand.  It's a chance for potential recruits to hear - first-hand - what it's like to work at your company.  It's an opportunity to informally showcase internal talent, all the way from newbies to executives.  It's a chance to empower your employees to share their thoughts and demonstrate how the passion of many come together under one roof.  Yada, yada, yada.

But what happens when your employee bloggers leave?  Simon Phipps of Sun explains how Sun - from the beginning - planned to handle the exiting of employee bloggers.  Not only do they leave the content live so that it will preserve history and not break urls - but they also "save" the blog for when the employee decides to return to Sun.  Love it.

But Simon also shares a story of what recently happened to Don Ferguson's blog when he left IBM for Microsoft.  Poof ... vanish.  It looks like, since Simon's post, IBM reactivated the link ... but it still raises a good question.  How should a company handle the exiting of their bloggers?  Especially if you decide to leverage employee blogs for employment marketing purposes, you should have a plan.  And stick to it.

gretchen

<via Scoble ... check out his post for further discussion>