There are more and more CEO’s using blogs. In some cases,rather than write just about whatever comes to mind that day, they see the blog as a purely promotional tool. Others see it as a personal expression tool. However, each must be aware that whatever they write, as personal as it may seem, will have some effect on the image of the companies they lead.
In many public companies, CEO blogs are written for them by copywriters and then edited by lawyers. You get a really bleached view of what the CEO really wanted to say. With liability insurance premiums quite high to cover “C-level” executives, companies don’t want their public CEO’s flying off the handle and talking about their drug experiments in university or anything edgy like that.
Well, here’s my opinion folks (you just knew it was coming right?):
It all depends on whether you consider it to represent the brand of the person, the brand of their company, or both. I believe that no matter how hard you try to convey that its your brand, it will have an effect on the company’s. Now if what you write as a CEO is so far away from the brand that people associate the company with, its not likely you will lead that company for long. Steve Jobs is edgy. Steve Jobs knows what he wants. If he write something along that line, its actually in keeping with the image that Apple wants. A bank’s CEO being edgy….I’m not so sure!
So for me, I will write what I feel reflects my true feelings about something, yet I will consider the effect of what I write on the company I lead. I will NOT have lawyers vetting my copy, nor copywriters doing it for me. You’ll see grammatical errors, but you’ll see the real me.
Just as I have embraced tremendous change in my being and my surroundings in the past two years, so has my company gone through change. As I continue to embrace change, you will see this blog evolve. The chinese say that challenge and opportunity are one and the same. I could not agree more.
Sass
PS. In going back to my first blogs, I have noticed an evolution. Whereas my first two months of entries focused far too much on competition, the last two have not as much. I suspect its because I felt a need to unload a lot of stuff I had been carrying inside. There it’s done. The “high road” does feel a whole lot better…