Company Leadership: The Power and Risk of CEO Blogging

Katherine Heires just published a great article on blogging called "Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?" As more corporate leaders start to blog, they will need to make sure that their content is accurate, timely, and well written. Why? Because blogging makes their thought processes visible-creating a window through which we can judge them. I wrote earlier about how it is important to create visibility within an organization. The CEO tends to be the person that we have the least visibility on. Sure they are more in the public eye but do they really know what they’re doing? Are they worth that big employment package they’re sitting on? As they write and react to comments, we get to see a little of the inner workings. This gives the average stockholder and employee an insight not currently available.

I have worked with some executives who just didn’t seem competent and I would have loved to read a blog by them to either prove or disprove my interpretation of their actions. (And inactions as the case may be.) I suspect that if leaders were expected to communicate to those they lead, we would have a different set of leaders in place. Perhaps CEO and executive blogging will provide a way for corporate America to get back to the basics of taking care of the customer.

I predict that some CEOs will hire ghost bloggers and that there will be a market for such folks. Just as today there is a market for speech writers. The thing about the Internet though is...they won’t get away with it for long.