While blogging Chief Executive Officers may be the important wave of the future, insightful public relations blogger Kevin Dugan of Strategic Public Relations, believes their value may be overstated.
In an important post, regarding various corporate blogging models, Kevin identifies CEO blogs as perhaps the weakest of the blogging types.
In fact, Kevin doesn't classify CEO blogs as true corporate or business blogs at all:
CEO blogs did not make this list because I think they are too closely aligned with personal journals. By personal journals, I'm referring to non-business, personal diaries where the content ranges from the silly to the sublime. It can create a credibility issue as CEO style and blog style are often at odds. For that matter, this grass roots technology is often at odds with the CEO's top-down approach.
Instead, Kevin recommends three different options for company business bloggers.
He suggests internal "eyes only" intranet blogs read by only selected company personnel. I think that as project and knowledge management tools, intranet blogs can keep everyone in an organization up to speed on events, in real time.
The event blog is a second of his recommendations. Designed to blog about special company happenings, they have some long term value for future reference.
I believe that ss archives within the site, they contain some latent search engine optimization power. Loaded with keywords, these blogs can help searchers enter the business website.
The third type of recommended company blog is the product blog. Designed to inform customers of new product ideas, and even to involve customers in the product development stream, product blogs have strong potential.
I think a product blog is one of the most powerful means of communicating and maintaining customer involvement with a company. If the customer is part of the product planning, development, and marketing channels, that person will feel part of the business. As such, a product evangelist is born.
While there is some problem with CEO blogs, I don't think it's quite time to throw the entire idea out with the trash. As with any new development in management, there will be early missteps.
I think there will emerge some very good CEO blogs, as the concept of blogging catches on in the executive boardroom. As the power of business blogs becomes apparent, from a marketing and public relations perspective, CEO blogs will grow as a phenomenon.
Some might even be very good blogs.
In the meantime, the CEOs will continue their communications operations in the traditional paradigm.
That paradigm will change; but perhaps not today.
