A letter to Business Week in response to the magazine’s cover story on blogging asks…
“Is this really what we want our corporate leaders spending hours a day doing?”
Yes. Definitely.
In thinking this through, it’s important to put a corporate leader’s blogging efforts in context. Step back from the new technology and all the attention the software gets and consider what blogging is:
Communication.
Ask most CEOs what their job is, and they’ll tell you that communication represents a massive part of their responsibilities. (I once heard a CEO say the letters stand for “customers, employees, and owners,” the primary audiences with whom a CEO must be engaged. I liked that.)
Blogs represent a new channel for communication. Not the only channel, to be sure, but a new one that may be better, in some cases, than the older channels. Imagine a CEO who rejected the telephone as a means of talking with investors just because it was new and different!
Neville and I interviewed the chairman of Holland’s Tulip Computers, who echoed this sentiment. His job, he said, was to communicate, and blogs provide him with a channel to do that more easily and in more of a two-way environment.
So, given that CEOs strategize the use of blogs as a communication channel that enhances or improves communication, yes, you bet. That’s what I want my corporate leaders spending hours a day doing.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
