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