Eight and a half million people are writing blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago, and a new one begins every seven seconds, according to search engine Technorati. Some large companies, including Boeing, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, are letting senior executives blog, but not a single blogger is known to be a Fortune 1000 chairman and/or CEO.
Not a Single blogger is know to be a Fortune 1000 Chairman &/or CEO. As from my research, most of the Chairman & CEO of the present Fortune 1000 Chairman &/ or CEO are belong to the early 60's or the Baby bloomer's group. It is a difference culture in sharing of the thoughts & ideas real time.
Traditionally, Chairman/ CEO are seve by secretary & Public relations officer's in their public papers, speeches..etc. the exposure for their mistake is less they handling the Blog themself.
With the Blogging technology is more friendly then ever today, I am in the opinion that Chairman & CEO must capitalized on the Blog strength to reach not only their employees.. & also to reach the Share holders' , Customers, Supppliers directly by publishing their own Blog.
CEOs refuse to get tangled up in messy blogs
By Del Jones, USA TODAY
Considering how outspoken some CEOs tend to be, you'd think there must be some brave head of a major company out there itching to write a blog. Dell Computer's Michael Dell? FedEx's Fred Smith? Xerox's Anne Mulcahy?
Eight and a half million people are writing blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago, and a new one begins every seven seconds, according to search engine Technorati. Some large companies, including Boeing, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, are letting senior executives blog, but not a single blogger is known to be a Fortune 1000 chairman and/or CEO.
In part, that seems surprising. Blogs, short for weblogs, are personal Web sites for posting thoughts, rants and opinions in chronological order. One written by a CEO would slice through traditional media gatekeepers and bring him or her unedited to the desktop of customers, employees, Wall Street analysts and competitors. A blog by a prominent CEO would attract instant traffic, could influence public opinion, perhaps steer legislation and maybe sell a few widgets.
But despite all of the power and sway that awaits an early adopter, it's going to take a brave CEO with thick skin to enter the blogosphere. The corporate sphere likes its skeletons packed away, or at least vetted through legal and public relations departments. Companies have been trained to be inoffensive.
The blogosphere, on the other hand, wars against harmony. Its mission is to air dirty laundry. There is even an undercurrent of radical bloggers who say all companies are evil and should be brought down.
The blogosphere is today's Wild West, where people post indelicate responses and react with incivility, known as "flaming." Blog readers can be counted on to hurl insults that insulated CEOs are not accustomed to hearing. Even more civilized blog readers are impatient with executives who are uninteresting or inauthentic.
When high-ranking executives blog, it's often not pretty. Randy Baseler, vice president of commercial airplanes at Boeing, writes a blog called Randy's Journal. But when Boeing ousted CEO Harry Stonecipher for having an affair with Boeing vice president Debra Peabody, Baseler was just the Boeing insider that raucous blog readers expected to post explicit e-mails exchanged between the lovers.
No such luck. Baseler's blog lay dormant for two weeks. When he finally posted, his entry began: "We've had an interesting couple of weeks as a company, that's for sure. But none of that has made a bit of difference down here on the ground. The focus at Commercial Airplanes is, as always, on our customers and on the future."
EXECUTIVE BLOGS
Jonathan Schwartz, chief operating officer, Sun Microsystems; http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan
Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems; http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/Gregp/
Randy Beseler, VP, Boeing Commercial Airplanes; http://www.boeing.com/randy/
Alan Meckler, CEO Jupitermedia; http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/meckler/
Mark Cuban, owner, Dallas Mavericks, co-founder Broadcast.com; http://www.blogmaverick.com/
Rich Marcello, senior vice president, Business Critical Servers, Hewlett-Packard; http://h20276.www2.hp.com/blogs/marcello
Christian Lindholm, director of multimedia applications, Nokia Ventures Organization (Finland); http://www.christianlindholm.com/christianlindholm/
Craig Newmark, founder Craigslist; http://www.cnewmark.com/
Bob Pritchett, president, Logos Bible Software; http://www.bobpritchett.com/blog/
Joe Wikert, vice president and publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Professional/Trade Division; http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/
General Motors blog with Bob Lutz, vice chairman, product development; http://fastlane.gmblogs.com
Source: USA TODAY research
The vague nod to the Stonecipher incident brought cries from readers who accused Baseler of wasting their time and cyberspace and making the world a dumber place with platitudes.
"Rumors and innuendos (are) not what this blog is about," Baseler said in an interview, but he has listened to criticism and recently upgraded his blog to permit reader comments — after carefully screening out those judged to be inflammatory. "If someone wants to start up a gossip column, they're welcome. That's not what I want to talk about," he says.
Getting feedback
CEOs are becoming aware that blogs wield power. Blogs all but launched Howard Dean as a presidential candidate, and they contributed to the departure of Dan Rather as CBS anchor. There are some CEO bloggers, but they come mostly from public relations or small tech firms such as Buzznet, Craigslist and Jupitermedia.
Many companies encourage blogging — below the CEO level. Microsoft has 1,800 employees doing it. They include Robert Scoble, who is becoming a cybercelebrity and is read worldwide. But neither Chairman Bill Gates nor CEO Steve Ballmer blog. Nor does Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, perhaps the most blunt Fortune 500 CEO. McNealy has never been accused of being neutral, but when it comes to blogging, he said in a 2004 speech that he has been advised to be more like "Switzerland." Spokesman Noel Hartzell says McNealy was kidding about Switzerland, but confirms that 1,000 of Sun's 32,000 workers blog, and McNealy isn't among them.
But Sun's second in command and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz is among the non-CEO, yet high-ranking, bloggers at large companies. His blog includes open letters to Brazil's president and to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, missives about a controversial game called Virtual Girlfriend and his father's U.S. intelligence career.
General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz writes a blog, as does Hewlett-Packard Senior Vice President and general manager of business critical servers Rich Marcello.
Lutz's blog rebuts negative auto reviews. And, unlike most executive blogs, he posts numerous reader comments, both supportive and critical. When on April 19, Lutz touted the Buick LaCrosse, a responder named Cody posted: "Yawn!! Buick. Uhhhhh, does anybody buy Buick anymore?"
Corporate blogging consultant Debbie Weil says there's an untapped opportunity for an early CEO adopter with the right touch. A blog would seem a nice fit for Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, who writes annual letters to shareholders with a blogger's flair and might have used the forum to respond to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's probe into American International Group and a deal involving a Berkshire reinsurance subsidiary.
A CEO in the hot seat such as Wal-Mart's H. Lee Scott could answer a lot of criticism with a blog. But it's not surprising that CEOs have so far ruled blogs out. They would create another avenue for critics. The blogosphere would object to dull entries, yet CEOs would still feel obligated to appease everyone from customers to shareholders to regulators. Someone like Scott would likely be pummeled with flamers and perhaps tempted to flame back. He would have to walk the impossible line between risk and readability.
"I would be really disappointed to think that CEOs couldn't blog," Weil says. "But it is a lot more difficult for a CEO to be that open."
Who's welcome
If blogging is the Wild West, blogging purists are the cattle ranchers out to run off sheep-herding executives for trespassing on their space. Baseler says he has received e-mails insisting that he exit, because if there is a place for corporate blogs, it's for employees to expose companies.
H-P, like Boeing, had a high-profile CEO ousting when Carly Fiorina left in February. This is how Senior Vice President Marcello addressed it: "So what was the reaction to Carly's departure internally? It varied. There were many people in HP who believed she was an extraordinary leader during her six years here — I was one of them. She has unbelievable innate leadership skills. She painted a vision for the company and stuck to it."
Again, far too tame for most blog readers, but at least he addressed it, says Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Cuban writes an edgy blog read by 1 million and reaches 100,000 via RSS (really simple syndication), where people can aggregate links to blogs onto a single Web page. Cuban says a non-CEO executive such as Marcello can get away with a nod, but if a CEO were to blog, there would be no way to ignore the elephant in the room. Honesty is key, and any CEO thought to be hiding details would only inflame blog readers, he says.
Marcello likes to reference poetry and music in his blog, and in an interview, he said blogs, like lyrics and poetry, must be from the heart. He says he'd ignore orders to tone his down. He says he sells servers for $2 million, and customers of such high-end products like a certain intimacy with the sales agent.
"I write what I believe. It's not really a blog anymore if it's filtered in any way," Marcello says.
Boeing's Baseler sells jets worth 60 times as much as H-P servers. That means his customers, too, probably want to know him well. But Baseler says he must be careful, "somewhat cautionary to make sure my blog has the culture, tone and feel of the company."
Winans International CEO Ken Winans says corporate bloggers are taking a big risk, because everyone from the Securities and Exchange Commission to "ambulance-chasing" lawyers are reading. It's a matter of time before one lands a company in court, Winans says.
"I'm not sure why anyone would sue me," says billionaire Cuban, who writes perhaps the most free-wheeling blog of anyone with deep pockets. "This is the USA, and freedom of speech is still protected," Cuban says in an e-mail, then points out that it was his stab at humor to ask why anyone in the USA would be compelled to sue.
SEC spokesman John Heine says he isn't aware of any SEC initiative specifically targeting executive blogs, but "we're always interested in everything."
"If someone writes on a blog at 3 a.m., is that a forward-looking statement?" asks Technorati CEO David Sifry, himself a blogger. "If that doesn't put fear into you, it should."
Wendell Weeks, who became Corning CEO on May 1, also sees significant legal risk. "You can't endanger the institution," he says. "A blog seems terribly self-absorbed. Maybe it makes me a Luddite," but he doubts if he will ever write one.
Sun's Schwartz recognized the sensitivity of a blog when he started to write an April Fool's Day entry but abandoned the attempt on his legal department's advice.
However, he says a blog is no different from a keynote speech. Those, too, need to be interesting and authentic, but can't be inflammatory. He sees blogs as less dangerous legally than e-mail because executives write blogs knowing they will be publicly available.
Even CEOs who have made peace with the legal risks might find that a blog is not worth the time and effort. Baseler says a good entry can take a couple of hours to write. He says it's worth it, because the more than 50,000 visits he's had since launching Randy's Journal in January are more than he could reach making speeches.
Schwartz says he has 30,000 readers on good days, up from 3,000 to 5,000 six months ago. After Marcello launched his blog before last Christmas, page views were running at fewer than 100 a month. April's page views were 3,176, a 51% increase from the 2,097 in March, which were up 58% from February's 1,326.
While executive bloggers are careful not to offend, there is one topic that appears to be fair game: the competition. Baseler doesn't hesitate to criticize Airbus. Sun's Schwartz said in his blog that one of Hewlett-Packard's operating systems was on its deathbed. A few weeks later, H-P sent Sun a cease-and-desist letter asking for a retraction. Rather than retract, Schwartz seemed to poke fun at H-P by linking to the letter from his blog.
Marcello counterattacked. He said in his blog that "Sun has lost so much money," that he is hearing from Sun customers who are nervous about the company's future and therefore wonder if they should spend millions on Sun servers going forward.
Blogging executives get "fine-grain" reports about who their readers are, and many of the most devoted readers are competitors, Sun Microsystems' Schwartz says. Baseler agrees. He says many readers of his blog live in Europe, which suggests some connection to Airbus.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2005-05-09-blog-cover_x.htm
