About 10% of Companies Have Fired Folks for Unauthorized Blogging

Blogging at work or, worse still, blogging about work? You probably know already that such behavior is frowned upon, but it could also get you shown to the door: A new study says that 9.1 percent of companies have fired people for violating policies about blogging or posting on message boards while on the job.

The study, from message monitoring company Proofpoint, also claims a whopping 27.6 percent of companies have fired people for violating the company's email policy and another 11 percent for violating a media sharing policy.

It's important to note that those statistics refer to the number of companies that have taken any action, not the number of workers who've been affected. If a company with 50,000 employees fires one person for unauthorized blogging, that would count the same as a company that fired its entire 20-person staff for the same reason. 308 companies were polled, indicating that 28 companies have terminated bloggers. (You can read the full study here, but you'll have to provide personal information to get it. It's full of additional statistics and data.)

While Wired's Threat Level blog is skeptical of that claim, it certainly doesn't seem outlandish to me. Has anyone at your place of business gotten the axe for blogging? Tell us about it here. We won't tell the boss, promise!

Related: Surf at Work to Get Yourself Fired 

LINK: Nearly Ten Percent of Companies Have Fired Bloggers, Survey Claims