What does a person’s writing say about the person? Plenty, especially if you learn how to use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.

You run text through the program and it categorizes words into 70 linguistic or psychologically-relevant categories. (See this post on why U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards may be trailing because of his language.)

I inputted the several recent blog posts from three popular CEO bloggers -- Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Bob Lutz, vice chairman of GM, and Bill Marriott -- and here are the partial results:

Some admittedly oversimplified takeaways”

·         Bill Marriott comes across as most honest, outgoing, and positive.

·         Paul Levy appears to be especially intelligent, with cognitive complexity and use of big words. He’s also quite outgoing and more negative than the other two CEO bloggers.  Interestingly he’s done an extraordinary job of turning around Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and has been writing about union issues, which may account for the negative emotion.

·         Bob Lutz comes across honest and smart.

What does this have to do with online communications? It’s an area I’m studying and have no answers yet, just some questions :

·         Should we “test” people's writing and analyze it before they start blogging on behalf of the company? (Especially people in high visibility leadership positions?) If they score very negative, low on honesty or low on cognitive thinking – would this person be a good representative of the company? Would it be better for someone else to lead online communications efforts?

·         Is it a good tool to coach others in communicating in this new conversational world? (Note that many people think that using the first person “I” is not professional and makes you seem too self-absorbed, but linguistics scientists have found that not to be so; use of the first person implies honesty.)

·         Should we never talk about this tool as it may scare execs about being naked out in the blogsophere – especially if they aren’t all that buff when it comes to being positive, cognitively complex and honest?

        Does using an analysis tool like this help us be more aware of ourselves – and help us change our language, and, in turn, change our behavior?

·         Lastly, can writing a blog every day make us healthier?  (Studies have proven that writing about personal topics 15 – 30 minutes a day improves people’s emotional and physical health.)

One last point.  So often in marketing we obsess over getting the messages right. Maybe we should spend more time on the language. As Dr. Pennebaker has said in many interviews and articles:

"Over the years it has become apparent that is far more important to see how people talked about a given topic than what they were talking about. People's linguistic styles provide far richer psychological information than their linguistic content.”

PS – When you put most companies’  press release through this linguistic analysis the scores are pitiful.

PPS -- Tomorrow:  The Jerk-0-Meter and its implications to communications. (A shorter post, I promise.)