CEOs are the personification of the companies they run and the stakeholders interests the company exists to benefit. The CEO is always in this role, whether speaking in the employee lunchroom, on an earnings call, at a trade show, milling around at a chamber cocktail party or through a blog.

Unless he or she tries to do so anonymously, a CEO who blogs does so as the official voice of the company. There’s no way around this. That means everything in the blog is commercial speech, open to interpretation and reaction by investors, unhappy employees and their families, class-action lawyers, competitors and other camp-followers with an agenda that may or may not have the company’s interests at heart.

Any well-written CEO blog will eventually create expectations and demand that the author tell it like it is on relevant stakeholder issues — the movement of the stock, analyst ratings, upcoming product launches, lawsuits, competing products, the guy fired for sexual harassment, trends in the market, rumors and gossip. Because few chief executives would open the company’s hood as a gathering place for the unaccountable masses, the CEO blog by design is destined to fade away or become yet another interactive marketing brochure.

In the post-Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley environment of tell-all-or-else corporate governance, the rank-and-file CEO crowd is unlikely to embrace the idea of creating more transparency than what they already struggle to comply with every day.

Steven Silvers

Also the trust issue, if I were to log onto a company’s site and find their CEO was not blogging, but yet their PR, marketing, business, etc. were blogging about the company I would be quite happy. I would not at all trust the company less because the CEOs comments were absent. I would just think how could she spend her time trying to keep up with the blogs while keeping the company running and “raising money for the company.” For me to keep up with all that goes on in the world of blogging its hard. I feel as though you miss a day you must spend twice as long trying to catch up, I’m not for being invested in or working for a company to have a CEO spending all her time doing just such.

You gave me some cause for thought with your article, and based on the excellent ideas expressed in the comments section here and Jeneane’s article, I ask if there is maybe a middle ground?

In my experience researching successful blogs it seems to me, who blogs, is one of the most important strategy decisions a company can make in setting up a blog.

Companies like Macromedia and Intuit are very successful with their blogs in part because their development and customer service staff blog, and not the CEO of the company. When I compare and contrast those companies and their blogging writer choices with General Motors, I think I see a middle ground. Bob Lutz a senior executive with GM is blogging on the GM FastLane Blog, but the blog has a few issues according to two customers I recently interviewed about GM.

To me the lesson from GM for companies is that to be able to successfully provide more of an outlet for customers you have to make sure you provide writers who can answer questions by providing bloggers from customer service and product development as well as show the passion and vision of the company through CEO and executive blogging.

John Cass

So I think CEO’s should be active in blogging. There are plenty of good examples of CEO blogs that are great at building brand and show to me that a CEO is not just a temporary hire. No matter how far away we get from the Enron and Worldcom scandals, there is still distrust of the motives of CEOs. Seeing that a CEO has real opinions and actually cares about customers and employees, and not just about making themselves a nice fortune, I believe goes a long way towards building a positive image as well as showing knowledge of the market.

I do think that companies should not do this lightly though. And never have a CEO blog ghost written by a PR person. But in the end, I do believe these should be used.