Corporate Blogging: The Rise of the Executive Blog

As we noted earlier, we consider there to be five types of corporate blogs, each with its own benefits and risks. This post considers Executive blogging. This is frequently the first wave of internal blogging. Sometimes these are intended for internal use, sometimes external and sometimes both. In all cases they face the same barrier to success – the busy schedule of the executive team.

Business Benefits of Executive Blogging

Executive blogs have three potential business benefits:

1. Senior executives can reinforce corporate vision, mission and priorities on a regular basis
2. Corporate news – good and bad – can be communicated quickly and in more detail than an email allows
3. Effective executive blogs can support corporate culture development, reinforcing positive trends and discouraging negative behaviours.

Authors

Sometimes the CEO wants to share their corporate vision. Sometimes a junior vice president wants to make a name for them self. This is top down, command and control blogging.

Target Readership

The people that report to the author. For the CEO, that’s everyone. For other executives, it’s those in their department (and ideally the leaders of other departments as well)

Risks Associated with Executive Blogging Strategies

The biggest risk? Executives start blogging enthusiastically. Then lose their enthusiasm. And stop. In many cases, external consultants position the blog as “an experiment” designed to build internal knowledge of web 2.0. When executives stop updating the blog, readers get the very real impression that the executive doesn’t care, isn’t working, doesn’t “get it.” This is not good.

Additional Thoughts on Executive Blogs

Analyst Rachel Happe has a really useful blog post describing ways to lower the barrier for executive blogging. Making it easy is the best way to minimize the risk of blog-abandonment.Our next post will describe a very different kind of corporate blog – those written by Subject Matter Experts.