At the Ragan Corporate Communicators conference—and with a Chicagoland client with whom I met following the conference—I heard an objection raised to business blogs that I’ve heard before. How can a company blog when it functions in a regulated environment? In fact, a communicator with a financial services company noted that, in addition to federal regulatory oversight, the company is also subject to distinct regulations in each of the states where it does business.

This objection to business blogging is a far more reasonable and thoughtful one that those I usually encounter (e.g., we’ll lose control of the message, we don’t want negative comments on our own company site, etc.). However, there is an answer: Don’t blog about anything that is covered by the regulations to which you are subject.

At the Ragan conference, following Jenn McClure’s session on RSS, I spoke with a communicator working for a pharmaceutical company. Having worked for a pharma before myself, I could easily relate to her concerns. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not allow a company to make any claims about a drug that do not reflect the FDA’s approval for the drug. Here’s an example: When I worked for Allergan, we could discuss Botox only in terms of the indications for which it had been approved at that time: strabismus and blepharospasm. While cosmetic surgeons were injecting their patients with Botox as a means of smoothing out wrinkles, we couldn’t talk about that. Doctors can prescribe drugs for anything they want, but we could not talk about a drug’s potential benefits for anything other than its approved indications—and even then only within the scope of the FDA’s approval. That is, even when discussing strabismus, for example, we couldn’t talk about any benefits of the drug that were not addressed in the approval, even if our clinical trials and shown them to be valid.

The concern, then, is that a blog could wind up referencing something outside the scope of the limited FDA approval. While the company representative writing the blog might be careful enough to avoid any such references, something could slip by in a comment, too subtle to be noticed in a review but still available to any regulator looking to catch the company in a violation of the rules.

This argument against blogging for regulated companies, though, supposes that a company blog has to focus on products and services covered by regulations. I suggested to the pharma communicator that a company selling diabetes products, for example, could host a blog called “Living with Diabetes.” There is no need to talk about the company’s product. The blog could talk about diet and exercise and other lilfestyle considerations, examine new research, interview diabetes sufferers, and cover a host of other topics without ever making any claims about any drugs. Further, company blogs can address non-consumer issues, such as the world of pharma R&D (e.g., what it takes to get any drug from research to pharmacies), the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and universities, what it takes to recruit research scientists…the possiblities are endless without ever stepping over the bounds into content that would attract the eye of regulators.

What a company blogs about, ultimately, should be driven by a strategic planning process that identifies issues and audiences that can best be addressed through a blog.