Chris Anderson’s solid thoughts on why “business blogging != executive blogging.” Anderson:
“The best business blogs come from the employees, not the bosses. They have more time, and are less prone to marketing gobbledygook and gnomic platitudes. And those kind of blogs are on the rise, not the decline.
The most successful business blogs are peer-to-peer: engineers, designers and managers within a company blogging about their own projects for the engineers, designers and other customers outside the company who use those products or care about that project.”
The second ‘graph really nails it…”the most successful business blogs are peer-to-peer.” And while I agree with most of his points in the post, I continue to wonder…what is it that prevents a typical (or, perhaps more approprately, a “prototypical”) CEO from connecting with customers in a natural manner? Is it because their blogs (like many speeches) would be ghost-written, and the individuals assigned to the task only know how to speak in generic, stilted terms? Is it because the prototypical CEO has neither the attention span nor interest in connecting with customers 1-on-1? Is it because they are stuck in a transactional mindset that doesn’t include actual conversations and relationships with their customers? Do they feel that, since they make 14x the annual income of their “average” customer (I made that statistic up), that they have nothing to talk about?
What is it?
(hat tip: dave)
It is probably a combination of time pressures and the fact that anything they say can and will be used in evidence against them in the draconian corporate governance environment in the US.
This is another example of the law of unintended consequences.
Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant
Very good and valid questions. Some answers:
1) Also CEO’s are human beings and have peers. So executive blogging will find it’s peers.
2) The blog will not replace 1:1 connections and relations. But if a CEO like me has roughly 5,000 personal contacts and roughly 200,000 customer contacts, touching each and everybody in person every week is REALLY difficult.
3) Ghost-Written? No! While my press releases are prepared by PR agencies and news letters by marketing and other media by other people, at least my blog is my “normal voice” :-). And one can tell by my style, grammer and the little spelling errors here and there.
Axel
Executive Blogging is slow on the uptake, in my opinion, due to the risks of executives putting anything in writing that has not been vetted by legal, PR, and investor relations.
Everything is leaked now, so anything the CEO puts in writing must be already be public knowledge.
Any real value add, like thoughts and considerations behind a particular decision, comes with real risk to the company (due to disclosure laws) and the stock price (due to Wall St looking for anything to move the meter)