In case you missed it, there’s a big debate going on right now on myragan.com, and ragan.com. It’s such an important debate that the Ragan editorial staff—and CEO Mark Ragan—even videotaped a discussion on the topic, and put it on the site.

What’s the debate about? Not politics; not whether employee engagement is a buzzword exploited by consultants or a legitimate thing that communicators should worry about; and not whether social media can ever work inside organizations

No . . . this debate is about cussing. Using naughty words. Specifically, it’s about whether writers at ragan.com should be able to use swear words in their stories.

Now . . . regular readers of this blog probably think that I caused the debate, by swearing profusely in a ragan.com article.

But no! It wasn’t me. While I may swear like a sailor out here on occasion, I rarely swear in the “journalism” pieces I do for Ragan. I may say the occasional hell or damn . . . but that’s about it.

No, a different editor caused the debate, because he used the word asshole in a story. And not only in the story, but in the headline!

Well, a furious tempest sprung up in a teapot on myragan.com, and now they’ve done follow-up stories, a video, and my pal David Murray even wrote an article about it, which is also on the site.

All of which prompted Mark Ragan to slap down a moratorium. When he saw that most of the people commenting on the issue were against swearing, he set a policy: No more swear words on Ragan.com.

Which if fine. I actually don’t give a shit one way or the other . . . but I do have a problem with the “reasons” that many people give for objecting to using swear words.

Whenever this debate springs up, people usually offer one of three reasons for being against it:

Reason #1: Words like Goddamnit offend their religious sensibilities.

Well, I don’t give a good God damn about that. As an agnostic who believes that organized religion is responsible for most of the evil in this world, I really don’t care about your religious sensibilities.

When your religion (pick one, anyone: Islam, Catholic, Christian) stop starting wars and slaughtering people in the name of your God, looking the other way while men rape boys (specific to Catholics), stoning women for not wearing the right clothes (specific to Islam), discriminating against women (Catholics) and gays (all of them), and promoting poverty and AIDS in third world countries with their stance against birth control and condoms (Catholics again) come talk to me about how my “dirty” words offend you.

Reason #2: Swearing is the product of a small mind.

Well hell, I like my mind. If swearing means its small, then I’ll take a small mind any day of the week. You and your big mind can go fuck yourself.

Reason #3: Swearing reveals a lack of creativity. It’s the sign of a poor writer. If you have to swear, the theory goes, it’s because you’re not a good enough writer to figure out a better way of saying what you want to say (this one came up again and again in the Ragan forum).

Well . . . bullshit. I’ll tell you what: Let’s pick a topic, any topic, and we’ll both write essays on it. I’ll use swear words if it’s appropriate or to make a certain point (which is the only reason to swear when you write . . . but it’s a damned good reason); you can write lily-white prose with nothing stronger than “gosh” in it.

And let’s see who writes the better essay.

Maybe your essay will be better. Maybe mine will be. But if yours is better or more creative, it won’t be because mine had swear words in it and yours didn’t.

The policy—which again, I support, for ragan.com—has already bitten me on the ass.

They re-ran one of my old blog posts last week. In it, I talk about a job title that I read about in an employee publication. The title was “Concerns Coordinator.” The job entails listening to employee complaints day after day.

The woman featured in the article looked like she was about to snap, and go postal.

I said that this job would eventually drive this woman insane, and I wrote the follow-up story I expected to see in the publication in about two months:

Concerns Coordinator kills four, wounds seven

'In a dramatic turn of events, former Concerns Coordinator Cindy Kasak reportedly stormed into the cafeteria on Friday with what police say was a 12-gauge shotgun, and opened fire, killing four of her fellow employees before turning the gun on herself.

According to eyewitnesses, Kasak reportedly kept shouting, 'What are your concerns now, you whiny little bitches!?!?!? What are your concerns now!?!?!'

Under the new policy, “whiny little bitches” was changed to “whiny little idiots.”

But that’s not the same thing, is it? They’re NOT idiots. They’re whiny little bitches. And that's what Cindy would have called them, in her mindless rage. Idiots doesn’t work as well.

I chose that word carefully, and I chose it for a reason. Changing it took some of the air out of the piece.

I’m not sure how this will play out in the future . . . but it all makes me very nervous.

I’m having a great time right now, doing a brand-new seminar with Jim Ylisela.

It’s “Advanced Employee Communiations,” and it has a little bit of everything. Basically, we walk folks through a four-step system for improving your internal communications.

1. Research (the boring, but necessary part: focus groups, surveys, executive interviews, vehicle assessment).

2. Planning (the even more boring, but even more necessary part, where we build a communication plan from the ground up.)

3. Execution (the fun part, where we talk about vehicles and social media and intranets and all the stuff I love).

4. Measurement (back to the boring but necessary stuff: making sure that what you are doing is working).

I thought the execution/vehicles/social media part of the seminar would be the most popular, but I'm shocked at how starving people are for the research/planning/measurement information.

We’ve had great crowds in D.C., San Francisco, and Atlanta so far, and we’re still going to Seattle, Toronto, New York, and Chicago. There's still room in some of those cities, so sign up!

And, as usual with my seminars, I'm learning as much as I am teaching. For example, last week in San Francisco, I met a couple of people from Intel. Now, Intel has always been ahead of the game, when it comes to technology and online publications and social media.

And they still are.

In fact, they have a policy where any employee can blog . . . and many of them are. They use them to share information, swap ideas, get the word out about something . . . all sorts of reasons.

But when I was chatting with the Intel communicators, they told me something I had never heard of before.

“Our executives—some of them, anyway—are starting to ‘pop in’ to employee blogs, and join the discussion,” one of them told me. “You know how you used to have Management By Walking Around? This is Management By Blogging Around.”

MBBA!! What a concept. If you believe executives, they have no time anymore to walk the corporate halls and chat with people . . . even though that’s a very effective management technique (and one that used to be very popular in the 80s).

But they do have 15 minutes a day to stop into some blogs, leave a comment, add to the discussion, read the comments, and see what people are saying.

Management By Blogging Around. What a wonderful concept. Now, maybe this isn't all that new. Maybe Shel Holtz will come out here and tell me that MBBA has been around for years. But it's the first I heard of it.

Of course, it will only work if employees are allowed to blog in the first place . . . so it probably won’t catch on anytime soon.