When does personal profile overtake the brand?

Last week it was reported by Sagecircle that Forrester Research had implemented a policy under which Forrester staff with personal blogs about their work related technology markets would be required to ditch them and instead publish their blogs on Forrester.com.

You can understand Forrester's position. When staff use content being which contains information developed for Forrester and if blogs are written during business hours, Forrester probably has a legitimate legal claim to that content. As many social network watchers have commented, it goes against the grain and looks heavy handed. But Forrester don’t pay their staff to do client analysis and use that learning to build their own profiles so they can eventually set up in competition with Forrester.

It does raise the question about how far the benefit of branding goes, compared to the control of paid for information, something we don’t have to worry about in the NFP sector. But where does the brand benefit of having staff blogging about their work on personal social networks end? When very high profile people in the Web2 space build their charities profiles up via personal spaces what will happen when they eventually leave?

None of us want to restrict positive branding but we do need to keep an eye to the future. How do we ensure that the brand doesn’t get so associated with the individual that it will disappear if the individual stops creating a buzz?