Fifth Annual CEO Survey asks about Blogging
According to the fifth annual 2005 PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey about 7% of CEO's surveyed are actually blogging, and only 18% are planning to host a company blog in the next two years.
“Even though there is greater awareness of the power of blogs today, CEOs may feel that employees expect them to be spending their time running the business, meeting customers driving growth.”
Efficiency is the key word here. As an employee, I “feel” that CEO's should be spending their time running the business, meeting customers, and using an effective communications strategy to engage in conversations both internally and externally around the values and benefits of the corporation. A blog can potentially help streamline, account, provide relevance, and add transparency into these efforts significantly compounding results.
…they are spending more time communicating “face-to-face” with employees with most saying they spend more than 41 percent of their time in this regard.
A CEO is only one person, and no matter how much of a Superstar they are (And I definitely consider Eliott to be one of them), they have “time and effect” constraints especially when employees can number in the hundreds or thousands. Giving them a blog provides the ability to have this same one to one conversation through a one to many medium, which should increase how many employees feel the net effect of having met with the CEO face to face no matter how much time that CEO has to do it.
“The CEO is the company's public face for many audiences, including Wall Street, the media, shareholders, and their own employees. Effective and consistent CEO communication builds credibility and strategic alignment with internal and external audiences,” said Julia Hood, PRWeek's editor-in-chief. “The real challenge for CEOs today is balancing the demand from stakeholders for responsive and timely communications.”
This is a very complicated environment to work in and each CEO will have to make their own call if the risks outweigh the rewards. What I do know is that a Blog is a communication tool, and if used wisely will significantly increase results with your strategies both internally and externally.
It would take some pretty hard arguments to convince me to say no to that.
