Should every CEO maintain a blog? That’s a question being asked more often now, with the rise in popularity of CEO blogs such as new evidence on how much businesses lag on the blogging front is reported today in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. Only 5.8% of the top Fortune 500 companies have blogs.
In a recent article I wrote for CW Bulletin, I noted how communicators, and the PR department in a company may want to blog, and even the CEO may be tempted to start his own blog, but there’s another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. The Jonathan Schwartz and Bob Lutz blogs for Sun and GM respectively, may not be enough to tip the scales of corporate blogging. What it might take is for a lot of smaller companies to prove its value, and create a bottom-up momentum.
Take a look at Munjal Shah’s blog about Riya, a small company with a big idea –a visual search engine that uses face and image recognition to search the web. He says things no corporate communications person would dare say anywhere, apart from on a blog. Commenting on one reviewer of his service, he observes:
While I disagree with some of their UI comments (especiall because they wrote it before I blogged the new search strategy), from an SEO perspective, Riya is a disaster. We haven’t done even the most basic things like good meta-tags.
That’s right, the CEO calling his product a "disaster." How often do you see that level of frankness in product blogging? The ability to say things minus the spin is what makes company blogs more credible. There’s the approved company voice on its web site, and there’s the true voice on its blog. If you were a customer, which one would you return to?
Hoipolloireport 
I believe it is a good idea for companies to blog and even CEO’s. But I can see why a legal department would be against this. The solution I would pose would be a simple one, in where you have the legal department reviews a post before it goes out. It would not take long and by review I do not mean edit things out. They could just look for areas in which they see legal action could be brought upon the company or maybe an area that needs clarification or revision. You don’t want them to spin your writings, but help keep the orginal message in a way that won’t affect the company legally. But hearing a CEO talk about a failure of a product is something refreshing, admitting the company failed in a certain area shows that they are human and not a machine.
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The whole purpose of blogging is to be honest and upfront. I don’t believe ‘departments,’ by definition, can accept that. Not to say they are bad or dishonest, but they represent too many viewpoints, and a blog is supposed to be the opinion or view of individuals not groups –unless otherwise stated.
I believe organizations will mature to the point where they will only hire people whom they can trust to also be spokespersons of the brand. There won’t be 2 policies –one for offline and one for online. If they want employees to evangelize the company about its products, or where hiring referrals are concerned, then they should be confident that employees –and not just marketing or PR people–can responsibly be the company voice in other electronic media environments.
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