Reading again through New Frontiers in Employee Communications: Current Practices and Future Trends, a survey report published in August by the Edelman PR agency (see my post today with a summary), I was thinking again about the report finding that nearly 20% of the survey respondents said, “My CEO would never blog.”
It would be interesting to get more insight into what this actually means. Does it represent purely the opinions of the communicators surveyed in that’s what they think, or does it indicate their reporting of their CEOs’ specific stated opinions? I’ve emailed Edelman to ask.
One thing that isn’t in any doubt is that there is a large and growing number of company leaders (meaning other senior executives as well as CEOs) already blogging. Yes, we know about the prominent ones such as Jonathan Schwartz, the COO of Sun Microsystems. And while we have yet to see the CEOs of big-name companies such as General Motors, Unilever, Coca-Cola or Microsoft (just to name four) blogging, who else is currently out there?
Take a look at the list of executive bloggers in The New PR Wiki CEO Blogs List. This list has grown substantially since I last took a close look in early September. As of today, that list includes the names of 86 executive leaders of companies in 14 countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA), with links to their blogs.
The countries with the most executive bloggers are the USA (no surprise there) and France, which might be surprising.
Guillaume du Gardier, who runs the PR Planet agency in Paris, doesn’t think it’s surprising. He has kick-started an executive blogging community with the CEO Bloggers Club. It’s been commented on by many other business bloggers, including me, since starting in August. Lots of French CEOs blogging there. It’s growing by leaps and bounds – currently, this blog shows the names of 47 CEOs with links to their individual blogs as well. Many of these aren’t listed in the CEO wiki. And, they are not all in France: there are CEOs in other countries including Canada, Germany, India, Spain, Switzerland and USA. The vast majority of posts in the blog are in the English language.
There is a real community building around the CEO Bloggers Club – one of the key elements of a successful blog – with members posting articles on wide-ranging topics that are worth reading and commenting on.
Here’s just a handful of examples from the past few weeks, most with lots of comments and disucssion:
- One-to-One Marketing a False Trail – Elizabeth Albrycht.
- Restoring hope to the customers – Laurent Bervas.
- 2 + 2 = 8 (or 1)?… : The challenging world of “blog-iquity” – Eric Briys.
- Corporate blogging – blogging with a muzzle? – Oliver Wagner.
- VCs on the board – Dragos Novac.
(For an analogous view on CEO blogging, see my post today on The role of PR in CEO blogging.)