The CEO blog has been around for a while now, and has been used effectively by some, and poorly by others. So what makes it the right move for your company?

1. Does your CEO have the time to devote to writing the blog, or is the plan to farm the writing out to interns and pretend it’s written by the CEO? If the CEO doesn’t have the time to commit to writing regularly, then there’ s no real sense in having them author a blog, as they’ll have a very hard time building up an audience, let alone retaining it. As for having ghost writers, if that information ever were to come out (as information has a tendency to do), then the audience will quite rightly feel cheated, and the backlash will most likely not be pretty. Note: regurgitated press releases are not content.
2. Can the CEO write well enough to engage the target audience? If they’re writing for technical audiences, do they have a full grasp on the issues that they need to talk about? If they’re writing for a more relaxed crowd, can they write with a sense of humor, putting across a personality for the blog?
3. Does the CEO have enough content to appeal to the target audience? Is the CEO close enough to the workings of the company to be able to first recognize topics of interest, and secondly be able to write about said topics effectively?
4. If there’s an urgent issue that comes up related to the company that needs to be addressed, can they make the time to blog about it, and make themselves a source of information for the outside world? Or, are they going to clam up and let the ‘regular channels’ deal with the issue?
5. Can they be candid about issues / controversial topics that face the company / industry, or are they going to gloss over issues, and address only fluff topics? Again, if the CEO doesn’t address issues that people are concerned about, then the blog will not have the level of credibility that it could have. Also, used effectively, the CEO blog could serve as a very good reputation management tool.
6. Does your CEO have the ability to self-censor, responding appropriately to criticism, and also knowing when not to respond to unreasonable comments? The last thing a corporate blog needs is a CEO that either ignores comments, or gets into a public ‘flame war’ on a company sponsored site.

So when should your CEO blog? When they give the right answers to the above questions.

Filed under: In-House, Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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