CEO Blogs

Coinciding with the concept of the corporate blog is the notion of the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) blog. Though corporate blogging is gradually gaining momentum, the creation of a CEO blog by an executive in an organisation may be one approach towards facilitating the notion of blog use in a company. Blogging that is led from ‘the top’ in an organisation may inspire other company members to blog and provide others with the reasurance that they have the support from ‘the top’ to do so (though adhering to company policy/guidelines). A CEO blog has the ability to engage all employees in a company, allowing them to read an Executive’s thoughts, be kept up-to-date about company initiatives, board member meetings and more importantly provide feedback and comments to the ideas of senior hierarchy. CEO blogs also possess the potential to make company employees feel part of their organisation in the sense that their ‘voice’ or ‘opinion’ matters.

However, it could also be argued that CEO blogs may have the unintentional adverse affect of not facilitating the concept of blogging in an organisation as there may be a reluctance from staff to post comments and provide feedback. There most certainly needs to be an element of trust and confidence for a CEO blog to be successful.

An interesting interactive video that I came across on the VIZEdu website iterates the important issue of corporate and top management support to make a corporate blog successful.

Some examples of CEO blogs include: Jonathan Schwartz’s blog (Sun Microsystems); John Dragoon’s blog (Chief Marketing Officer for Novell); Kevin Lynch’s blog (Adobe’s Chief Technical Officer & Senior Vice President) and Oracle Executive Blogs.