CEO Bloggers' Club

We the democracy (Democracy V2.0)

My previous post described the return of the “new economy.” The examples I cited underlined the fact that the majority of monopolies need to reinvent themselves quickly: major record labels, telecommunications companies, the press, TV …

I’d like to go a bit further by anticipating the advent of a “new democracy.”

Various participants in this blog have stressed the consumer’s desire for truth. We argue that businesses of the future need to establish an adult relationship with their clients – a relationship based on respect and confidence.
The company that figures out how to earn this consumer confidence will emerge the winner in any market.

Blogging both manifests and enables this democratic revolution.

We could even go so far as to draw the comparison between the worlds of economy and politics, between the consumer and the elector.

In the political sphere, the desire for truth is at least as strong, if not more.
But political discourse today is a reflection of marketing discourse: it’s still cynicism that dominates.

If we accept the idea that the blog will become a necessary tool for the economic leaders of tomorrow, we could assume (and hope) that the blog will become a necessary tool for the next political leaders.

The blog is the new Agora, a gathering place in Ancient Greece where democratic debates took place with everybody watching and participating.
Blogging is returning to the roots of democracy.

Beyond the horizon, we hope to find a new world. “America is not far.”
Are new CEOs the explorers of the future?

New economy V2.0

I have the impression that the rapid emergence of blogs (and most notably of this blog;) is tied to the collective sentiment that something important is happening. We want to share new ideas, to verify that we’re not the only ones thinking them …

I think that since September 11 our attention has been diverted, keeping us from fully recognizing the digital revolution that is already well on its way. It’s also possible that the web of traditional opinions (economical and political, brought to us by traditional media) had good reasons to not talk about it …

I’m going to cite 4 recent breakthroughs in the domain of technology:

Tinbasher - and a new CEO Bloggers' Club recruit

When I talked to Times (London) reporter Andrew Heavens last month for this article (good luck accessing that if you're not in the UK), I mentioned to him a blog I knew about, Tinbasher, that is solely about sheet metal. I did so not because I am myself a sheet metal enthusiast - Egyptian linen sheets, maybe, but nothing metallic - but to illustrate the point that there are micro-blogospheres within the larger blogosphere, and that businesses should find theirs and engage them. Or, as Frank Kelcz (who held senior roles at publishing companies Bertelsmann, ACE Electronics Publications and VNU in Europe and launched Ziff-Davis over here as well) put it at our day session on Friday, the blogosphere allows for every imaginable specialist publication in the world to exist and thrive if the market for it is there or can be created.

No logo? New logo!

"To compromise or not to compromise?" Jackie asks. For me, I think there is too much compromise these days.

“No logo,” the book by Naomi Klein, showed that some big companies have turned into economic dictatorships: we are living under a “shut up and buy it” system.

Artists have been aware of this for a long time: as the Punks said, “we are living under a fascist regime.”

The solution is not “anarchy in the UK.” The economic system, money, branding, etc. is not the problem; on the contrary, they are powerful forces. It’s just a question of balance.

We need logos!

Logos are an efficient way of focusing energy, dreams and incarnating the values of a company and of society. There is a place for new brands; those that people can trust.

The war has begun. The system makes you think that there is no battlefield, but in fact, the battlefield is everywhere. It is an economic war without limits.

As CEOs, we have a responsibility to change things: We need a new system. I feel we need to hurry and rebuild before the fatal crash.

How should we change things? By doing business differently and not only focusing on profits. It’s “obliquity.” Profits should be the indirect reward of doing business honestly.

The good news? I think it’s not so difficult.
Just make your business funky.

Rock ’n roll, baby!

Restoring hope to the customers

In response to the last two articles (“Obliquity” and “Restoring leadership”): For me, obliquity means not making profit your main goal. We must restore leadership because real leadership is lacking.

To take this idea a step further, there are two schools of thought concerning blogging. Blogging is an evolution or a revolution.

For me, blogging is a revolution. It’s a new paradigm. It’s not just a new marketing tool; it’s a new way of marketing products. Let the customers (and the people) choose for themselves.

People want to trust. The war in Iraq, Enron, Italian election … people are shocked and want something different. For the economy (and perhaps politics, etc. as well), I’m totally convinced that blogging is the solution. With the blog, you open access to backstage. People want to know what’s going on behind the scenes, what they’re buying, and how it’s made. Their need to know is so strong that we CEOs have no choice but to be entirely open.

Customer confidence is everything. The companies that will be able to restore hope and dreams will be the new leaders.

Okay, friends, ready for action?

What to do if your company keeps getting shafted by media

I have been talking to a Big Media journalist about blogs over the last few days, and some interesting viewpoints have emerged from the conversation. We started out talking about how blogs and journalism differ from and complement one another, and ended up talking about why that is relevant to corporations and other organisations.

In journalism, you have a large number of generalists trying to produce authoritative, extremely reliable content about subjects that may be incredibly complicated. Some of them can manage it; many of them cannot. If our interests are in an educated public as a result of journalists producing the most informative and accurate reporting possible, then the tendency of many journalists to misinform - despite what may be the purest of intentions - cannot be ignored as simply "how journalism is".

Get a brand name using your blog

Greg Reinacker, CEO of NewsGator is having a contest on his blog to rename his company and his product, a popular RSS newsreader called NewsGator. He is offering a worthy prize.

So...I'd like to solicit some ideas from you. And what's in it for you? If we choose a name that you submitted to us first, we'll send you a brand-new Windows Media Center computer, and a free 12-month "Plus" subscription to NewsGator Online Services including NewsGator Media Center edition. All told, somewhere around a $1500 prize. I'd post a specific link to a machine, but if we can, we'll wait for the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 launch, so you get the latest and greatest.

As Steve Rubel puts it Who needs a focus group when you have a blog?

What it takes to be a good CEO blogger

I had an interesting exchange yesterday about CEO bloggers. Someone said to me that the idea of a blogging CEO, like the idea of a blogging politician, was ludicrous. He told me his opinion that CEOs, like politicians, could never be expected to say anything genuine or unscripted by the PR department. My reply to him went something like this:

First of all, the PR department must take its hands off the blog in order for it to work properly - no fake blog entries written for the CEO, and no vetting posts before they go live. (If your CEO cannot be trusted, even after being trained in how to blog legally and sensibly, not to drop clangers in the posts he writes, then he should not be blogging.)

In order to blog well, they also have to be the right CEOs - straight-shooters, engaging and with interesting things to say. Sun Microsystems' Jonathan Schwartz is a great one, as are Thomas Nelson Publishers' Michael Hyatt and Five Across CEO Glenn Reid.

I am happy to tell a CEO or any other business exec: You should not blog, and even if you begged me to help you do it, I would not. Bad bloggers can influence how the world perceives the blogosphere, and I and my colleagues have got very certain ideas about the right way to blog. Blogging is about using an authentic, credible voice. And let's face it: not every CEO is credible, and not every CEO knows how to communicate authentically or can even be trained to do so. In some cases, that authentic voice isn't something that the company necessarily wants the public to hear. Such companies should not have a blogging CEO.

The politician who blogs is a fad here in the UK, but it will only last until the first career suicide by blog - in no time flat, the spin doctors will have their hands all over the blogs, rendering them pointless at best, laughable and damaging at worst. Politicians are all coming from the same gutter, and it is not often that you hear someone praising something the government has done. But there actually are many companies out there that are fantastic organisations, doing interesting and worthwhile things in their industries, with satisfied customers who evangelise their products, services and brands freely and happily. Those are the kinds of places many people would love to work. And those are the companies whose CEOs and other employees make the best bloggers and impeccable representatives of their respective companies.

Executive blogging

This may be not the most recent article but it contains a very useful perspective for executives who may be experimenting with or considering blogging. Trevok Cook of Corporate Engagement explains the 'chicken and egg' situation most executives faces at the moment in their communication with the external world.

I think the main barrier is that most executives are uncomfortable in an unstructured and uncontrolled environment and blogging looks like that. When they do media interviews they rehearse heavily and practice 'on-message' techniques. They are in an environment where their words will be pored over and will be turned on them if it appears they have strayed from the message. In short, they are imprisoned in the communications world that most bloggers rebel against.

Bloggers are conversationalists, executives do set-pieces. Even if they did blog, most of them would still come across as stitched-up, so maybe they shouldn't blog unless they are willing to relax. But I believe they should blog, confidence in Boards, CEOs and senior management is a major consideration for investors and blogs seem to me a way of building those relationships and engendering confidence. Once a few start blogging the rest will follow and we will find that the stitched-up stuff was mostly a response to the gatekeeper role of the media, once that role is diluted executives will be able to loosen up a little more. We're in a chicken and egg situation at the moment."

Blogs within corporation

This is a very wide topic, of course, so I will start with what I wrote on my company's internal blog (no link, for obvious reasons) as a preparation for an interview with journalist from a specialist journal who gave us this synopsis.

In recent years, web logs (or 'blogs') have proliferated across the Internet. These public online diaries, updated regularly with the owner’s comments, news and recommended Internet links, have typically been published by private individuals. However, organisations are starting to see the blog’s potential as a fast, informal way to share information - project updates, research or test results, product release news, industry headlines - with employees, suppliers and customers. This feature will examine the business, organisational and technology changes needed to support a corporate blog and how the blog format can sit alongside established collaborative mediums such as email and document sharing applications.

What can blogs offer to businesses that more traditional forms of corporate collaboration do not?

What are traditional forms of corporate collaboration:

• email


• intranets


• IM


• shared networks


• conference calls


• meetings

What is the objective of corporate collaboration:

• effective management of processes


• communication


• distribution of information


• knowledge creation/evolution


• people management - satisfaction, personal growth etc

Are current forms of corporate collaboration doing their job? I don't think so. Email is often a distraction rather than effective communication tool, intranets, web portals are boring and usually mean an extra chore rather than being an effective tool. Collaboration software, if installed, is imposed top down with insufficent training and motivation to the individual employee.

This leads to a more general point about knowledge management and collaboration - technology and tools are seen as an organisational phenomenon. The focus should be on the individual, the organisation will follow. A true bottom-up approach. Managing personal information, 'individual knowledge space' first, before a company gets to see benefit of KM and collaboration technology.

Blog is an individual tool with impact both on the blogger and the reader/commenter. It can act as a filter of captured and evolving knowledge, it is a content management system that is sufficiently simple to be flexible and sufficiently robust to be effective. The features that make a blog an ideal tool for emergent knowledge management is speed, flexibility, interactivity, and ability to spread information outward.

Blogs can also be business intelligence tools - an early warning system to alert organisations to developments that require a response. Every signal is a noise, only when it is filtered it becomes information. Blog is a format with informal, loose and simple enough structure to capure signals, but structured enough to give emergence to data-patterns i.e. information and knowledge. Blogs as early warning systems would work in larger organisations where natural communication flows have been disrrupted. It is a perfect tool to fit the gap created by remote business processes. Blogs create and aggregate enormous amount of pre-filtered background noise. They can also turn your employees into trusted hubs to reconnect to social network inside and outside the organisation.

Blog as a project management tool - a way to capture and maintain unstructured input in a structure but informal envirnoment. This is where interactivity is paramount. For example, I have set up and ran two our project blogs, which have proven an amazing virtual resource for all project members. The most amazing effect occurred after a couple of months of blogging for one of the project blogs. We had an impromptu meeting with one of the people who travels widely and is hard to pin down but who had been reading the blog regularly. As a result, we could start talking about the project instantenously without presentations, documents as we were all aware of what the others think and know. This is because all the information, links, ideas, articles etc had been described or linked to on the blog. We were all on the same blog page, so to speak.

Here are some examples of corporations that use internal blogs: InfoWorld, DaimlerChrysler, Sun Microsystems, IBM and, of course, Microsoft with around 1,000 employees with blogs. That's what I call a good start, but there is a way to go...