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By D. Weinstein

Opportunely published at a time when corporations large and small are starting to see the value and strategy in blogging, Debbie Weil's "The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get it Right" (Portfolio, 2006) does well providing a guide to newbies thinking about jumping into it all.

Derived from Weil’s own blog and consulting practice, with footnotes galore, the book is well-sourced, an easy read and prescient.

To be clear: This book is not primarily for those who already participate. But for those who need guidance before taking part. Blog-savvy readers, however, might find the book a useful reference tool; a style guide of practical hints.

A CEO, corporate speaker and consultant, Weil starts by answering 20 questions she’s asked often about blogs. She frames her answers for the uninitiated and to what corporations can get. Such as: A free marketing strategy; an on-going focus group; fresh content found easily. I can see marcomm pros convincing executives to read "The Corporate Blogging Book" to help convince the same executives to jump in.

Blogging, participating, “It’s not about being cool” Weil writes at the book’s end. It’s about being real. Like the best blogs, authenticity is king in books, too.

We have had some truly rousing discussions already this fall season on IAOCblog.com. We'd like to keep the momentum going. If you would be willing to lead the discussion on the blog for a week, please send me e-mail with a suggested show topic.

We have been talking about CEO bloggers this week. One way for CEOs to ease the brutal time commitment of daily blogging while still looking techno-savvy is to be a guest on someone else's blog -- like ours.

There are a lot of support people behind the scenes at This Week on IAOCblog.com helping to make our guest bloggers look great by cleaning spam comments and spam trackbacks, managing permissions and access, and troubleshooting technical difficulties. Isn't it nice to know you'll have a team working for you when you lead the discussion here.

So come on CEOs (and those a tad below) -- send us your show topics and we'll work hard to make your show a success!

With Thanks for Your Participation,
STEVE O'KEEFE
V.P., IAOC

Talk about opening a can of worms with the first two questions on the theme of this week's discussion: Should the CEO blog?

1. Is it OK to ghostwrite a CEO blog?

2. Should a ghostblogger for a CEO reveal him or herself?

Suffice it say that there does *not* appear to be agreement on these two questions. The writer/copywriter types generally weigh in on the side of, "Of course it's OK to ghostblog; that's what executive speechwriters do." Those who are not writers, per se, but who work in a corporate environment (see comments here) disagree. If the CEO doesn't write it, they say, then it ain't a CEO blog.

I tend to agree with the later. But am willing to stake out a middle ground where the CEO gets editing help. How "heavy" that editing is gets stickier...


Question #3: What should the CEO blog about... or not?

Let's get the obvious out of the way. What can't CEOs and other senior execs blog about?

- proprietary company information (which could range from new products or strategies to competitive intelligence to water cooler gossip)

- financial information (forward-looking statements, anything the SEC would frown on)

- anything he/she doesn't want to reveal

With that out of the way.

The topic/style of a CEO's blog seems to be driven by the CEO's personality, writing ability, size of the company and nature of the business. Some of the best CEO bloggers, so far, run privately-held companies. Their approach seems to be I'll write about whatever the hell I want to - it's my company and my brand dammit.

Private Company CEO Bloggers

GoDaddy founder/CEO and blogger Bob Parsons is deliberately provocative. He likes to circumvent the media by telling his side of things (about GoDaddy's rejected Superbowl ad, for example). Doesn't mind being politically incorrect (see my interview with Bob shortly after he blogged about the use of torture in U.S. interrogation techniques). And is happy to tell us about the newest Go Daddy Girl ("sexy, hot and blazing fast"). Clever blog title as (well sex always sells, right?) it attracts readers and Danica Patrick is in fact an Indy car racer .

He also writes about business. A recent entry is a long and detailed explanation of why Go Daddy withdrew its IPO filing.

As to whether Bob actually writes all this stuff himself, I have no idea. He told me he did (that was over a year ago). But his blog postings seem to have slowed down a lot since then. Anyway, his blog is fun to read, well written and he often gets hundreds of comments in response.

So there's one side of the scale for a CEO blogger.

Also in this category is Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia and Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Zane Safrit, CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, and one of my favorite CEO bloggers, probably also fits in this category. Zane isn't outrageous but his postings are always thoughtful. He writes about a bunch of stuff that interests him from current events and health care policy to the challenges of running a small young company and things that make him laugh. His blog has a new tagline which is spot on: Thoughts from running a small company in a rapidly changing industry.

Public Company CEO Bloggers

At the other end of the spectrum are public company CEO blogs. There are fewer of them. The worst is probably Whole Foods' John Mackey. His last blog entry, as of this writing, is dated June 26, 2006. The best, hands down, is Sun Microsystem's Jonathan Schwartz (the first Fortune 500 CEO blogger). He's a terrific writer with a light touch and seems to have an uncanny knack for taking really techie stuff and turning it into something meaningful for us non-geeks. From a recent entry:


Huh?

But then he writes:

More later but please dive in and add your two cents (or more) on what CEOs should blog about - or not - and why.

Debbie Weil's questions about the advisability and ethics of ghostwritten CEO blogs raises a broader question about the future of blog standards. If blogs become as widespread as websites, will the same community standards be enforced (or enforceable)? Will the average reader know (or care) about the standards? Amy Gahran rightly pointed out in her comment that today ghost written blogs (or other types of phony blogs for that matter) will be outed by the blogosphere. That works in online communities where there are sufficient numbers of independent bloggers who care about such things. Isn't it possible, perhaps likely, that online environments will emerge where people are completely oblivious to today's standards?

Will there be different standards and expectations for different blogosphere communities? For example, do you distinguish between individual blogs with a single voice and group or corporate blogs? Even within individual blogs, there must be different levels of expectation for the personal musings blog, the citizen journalist blog, the industry expert blog, the enthusiast blog, or the CEO blog.

If you spend a lot of time reading, commenting and/or writing blogs, it's easy to assume that the blogosphere standards are universal. But when I step away from my computer and go out and talk to people, I find almost universal ignorance of a blog ethic. Whether I talk to students, or to engineers, or to managers ranging from manufacturing to services, I find many who read about blogs and hear about blogs in the mainline media. But very few say they actually read blogs. Fewer still get RSS feeds, or know what it is. Almost none have commented on a blog. I find far more students actively involved with social media like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube than with blogs. If blogging is to continue its torrid rate of growth, it seems to me the blogosphere may be approaching the point where it transitions from a small village ethic to a multi-layered urban ethic. What's your take?

Don Dunnington

Yesterday's responses to the question, "Is it OK to ghostwrite a CEO blog?" added up for the most part to "Yes." I still have some reservations, idealist that I am.

Disclosure: I'm a non-corporate type who relishes *not* being locked up in a cubicle. Don't get me wrong; I love working with the smart folks who are brave enough to work within the confines - and exciting potential - of a large corporation. I envy their big salaries, big budgets, business cards stamped "SVP of" and all that. No quibbles there.

But practicality rules. A lot of CEOs (most?) are not naturally talented writers. Many don't have the time or don't want to spend the time to write the blog.

So... given the reality of blog editors and/or ghostbloggers for CEOs and other senior executives, should the ghostblogger reveal him or herself?

This could be done by a disclaimer on the blog. Or via the "bio link" of the CEO blogger at the bottom of each post. For example, you might click on the CEO's name and up would pop a mini bio and words to the effect of:

Er, now that I've written that, I don't know if it really works. So, fire away. Waddya think? Should a ghostblogger for a CEO reveal  himself and if so, how?

This is one of the questions I get asked most often. What I want to know, dear reader, is what you think?

A bit of context: Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems and the only public Fortune 500 CEO blogger, says he writes his own blog. He told AP reporter Rachel Konrad:

The quote is from her story titled Sun CEO among few chiefs who blog. It was widely distributed in dozens of newspapers over this past weekend. (I also got quoted in it, which was kinda fun.)

So is Jonathan an anomaly? Could or should CEOs of other Fortune 500 (or Fortune 50 or Fortune 1000) companies write their own blogs? If yes, why? (Authenticity? Efficient and powerful communication?)  If no, why not? (They don't have time; can't be transparent, enough, etc.) Jump in and add your thoughts below.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: CEO blogs are the, topic du jour these days with Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz, the first Fortune 500 CEO blogger, evangelizing the benefits of this powerful new communications channel. Dozens of CEOs in the U.S. and other countries, heads of both public and private companies, are starting their own blogs. Here's a list of CEO and senior executive bloggers.

But there are lots of questions:

Can a CEO or senior executive write openly enough to make his or her blog compelling and not just a PR stunt? What if the CEO isn't a good writer? Is ghostblogging a CEO blog OK? Does a CEO have time to blog? What should the topic of a CEO blog be? Why should a CEO give away insights on a blog when he or she could charge for them in a speech? How do you quantify the benefits or ROB (Return on Blogging) for a CEO? Is a blog really the new must have accessory for a CEO, as Jonathan Schwartz says it is?

ABOUT THE DISCUSSION LEADER: Debbie Weil is a corporate and CEO blogging consultant and author of the recently-published The Corporate Blogging Book (Penguin Portfolio 2006). She shows the big dogs how to use blogs as a next-generation marketing and communications strategy. She also writes BlogWriteForCEOs, considered one of the most influential blogs about business blogging. She invites you to download Chapter 1 of her new book. And of course to order your copy on Amazon! (It's also available at Borders and Barnes & Noble and other major bookstores.)

Debbie has a unique background as a veteran journalist with an MBA and corporate marketing experience. She has worked as an Internet marketing consultant with startups as well as Fortune 500 companies for over a decade. She's the publisher of award-winning WordBiz Report, an e-newsletter read by close to 20,000 subscribers in 87 countries.

She has been quoted on the topic of corporate and CEO blogging in Fortune Magazine, The New York Times and numerous other publications. A graduate of Harvard with a degree in English, she has an MBA from Georgetown University and a Masters in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin. She is based in Washington DC.

Furthering our discussion of how Information Technology (IT) departments sometimes frustrate efforts at speedy, efficient messaging by marketing communications professionals -- a discussion launched by Dee Rambeau here and embraced by David Johnson on his blog -- and taken up by Neville Hobson on his blog and germane to this week's discussion on Knowledge Management tools, I would like to weigh in with a quote from today's Wall Street Journal. The article is entitled, "Offices Co-Opt Consumer Web Tools Like 'Wikis' and Social Networking," by Vaughini Vara.

"For some, trying new technology has meant defying reticent IT departments. Last year, Jeff Nolan moved from SAP's venture-capital arm to an operational role at the company and wanted to start an internal wiki using software from Socialtext, Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., stat-up funded in part by SAP's VC arm. The IT department said no, bringing up privacy issues and other concerns, but Mr. Nolan signed up anyway. Employees could access Socialtext online, which meant Mr. Nolan didn't have to use SAP's equipment to run it. Later, when the IT department saw that the wiki had been a success, it agreed to manage Socialtext hardware that sits at SAP, which gives the company more control over it."

"'They realized that the world would not stop spinning, and the sky would not fall, and that it actually had benefits,' Mr. Nolan says."

Okay, Neville, the clash with IT is not a thing of the past. This is a real problem today in large businesses, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies. We need to put some solutions on the table.

STEVE O'KEEFE
V.P., IAOC

I have always wondered what it would be like to be sucked into a Black Hole.  Would it be ...   more »