Learn and Lead

Continuing with the thread I started in my previous post Do you trust corporate blogs, and picking up from posts on Trust by Ken Allen and Tony Karrer, I came across Chris Brogan’s post Advertising and Trust. Chris wrote in response to Jeremiah Owyang raising questions about Chris’s sponsored post for Kmart. Chris does a great job at analysing and responding. In this process I discovered many posts that talk about trust and integrity of bloggers. Two posts that caught my eye were Lucretia M. Pruitt: What is Your Time Worth? What’s Worth Your Time? and Barbara Gibson: What is your integrity worth? I don’t follow blogs of Jeremiah, Lucretia or Barbara, but I had no reason not to trust them. They have an opinion that they are sharing.

According to a recent Forrester Research report, people trust emails from who they know most and they trust corporate blogs the least. According to the report, only 16% people trust corporate blogs. I had written about CEO and corporate blogging sometime back and this report presents some interesting perspectives.

You can read posts that comment on this report at RWW and Rohit Bhargava’s blog.

What do you think? Do you trust corporate blogs? Which ones do you read regularly and why? It would interesting to get some views of corporate bloggers too.

In continuation of my earlier post on CEO and corporate blogs, I found this video on Mark Oehlert's blog.

I attended two sessions of the Blogging and New Media Workshop organized by Indian Blog and New Media Society. I was actually surprised to see a relatively large turnout. There would have been approximately 100 people. That’s not bad for a Sunday evening session and a working day Monday evening session. The audience was very varied in terms of their experience as a blogger and I commend how the presenters, Ajay Jain and Abhishek Kant, handled the audience questions with patience. There were also a significant number of women in the audience so it’s not just the men who are blogging in India.

Quite honestly I thought the audience would be really interested in blogging, learning through blogging and exploring new avenues. Most were interesting in knowing how to make money through blogs. No harm but whatever happened to learning and personal growth through blogging...

The sessions I attended were on Marketing your blog, Benefits of Blogging for Executives, Business and Professionals, and How to Make Money as a Blogger. I found congruence in many of the tips in the sessions and in one of my previous posts on blogging. A part of the session was dedicated to corporate blogs and how companies can benefit through blogging. Companies should not only use blogs but also other social media sites to manage their brand and monitor what’s being said about their brand. Some important tips of companies were not to outsource blogging, and have people other than just CEOs and PR/Corp Communication Manager to communicate with the readers. There are some examples of corporate blogs. I had posted some examples in my earlier posts on corporate blogging and tips on running a team blog.

There was an interesting session on SEO, SEM and generally marketing your blog. I didn’t know that links to authoritative sites like Wikipedia improved your search ranking. And that broken links on you site can have an adverse effect on your search ranking. When Google search engine searches your blog, it also adds links on your blogs to its search. So having inbound links (links to your own blog pages) are better than outbound links. However out-links to relevant blogs does increase your search ranking. What statistics to measure was also discussed. I found an interesting post on a quick primer on various web metrics and how to use them.

It was good to see a large turnout for the workshop and to see the audience interacting in the workshop. With the Indian blogging scene growing exponentially, I am sure groups like IBNMS will make a significant contribution. Here’s wishing IBNMS all the very best for their future workshops.

Continuing with my writing about blogging, another interesting question before me is whether senior management should blog, and if so where, as in inside the firewall or have public blogs? There has been much written about CEO blogging and corporate blogs. In this post I list various sites I found, some I really liked.

The big question that still remained for me is whether senior management should blog within the firewall or outside? Of course if they are connecting with the customers or partners, it is best to have a public blog. But if the main purpose is to connect with the employees, should this with only confined to password protected (or otherwise) within the firewall or should be a public blog? There are advantages of a public blog. I believe the corporate information walls are anyway so porous that it doesn’t really matter having a blog within the firewall. We regularly find corporate emails written by CEOs/senior executives being forwarded endlessly. A public blog will help connect senior management to potential employees, and also stay connected with former employees. Both these are important in this age of talent crunch. Of course, having a blog within the firewall makes it easier for management to talk about clients, failures and be more specific about projects and internal policies. So the jury is still out there about which is better.

Would love to hear more views on this subject.

My Top 10 CxO Blogs:

1. Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International – well written and connects with customers and employees. I quite like this one.
2. Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters – As per Tom, in his blog he is going to “write about what interests me, which is often my work at Thomson Reuters, as well as wider issues like technology and media - two areas that I am fascinated by.” Seems like a genuine attempt to connect with employees and make the leader in Tom more human.
3. Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies – reads like a blog aimed at conversations with employees. Vineet wants this blog “to yield an untiring momentum that will help us collaborate to transform our today and craft our own tomorrows.”
4. Rajeev Karwal , Former President and Chief Executive, Reliance Retail, Reliance Industries Limited –truly a personal blog “to express gratitude to people, organizations, stories and situations which have taught me some important lessons in professional and personal life.”
5. Scott Ragsdale, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, naseba – Very un-CEO type blog, written from the heart, couldn’t care less about what people might think. As per Scott, “the main purpose of this blog is to communicate with my 300+ employees, my future employees and leaders of naseba, my clients, future clients, and investors – at the same time helping me stay focused on my climb — to build naseba into a multi-hundred million euro company.”
6. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems Inc. – writes mostly with customers as intended audience. Seems more like the Sun website and less like a blog.
7. Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Adobe – software development is Kevin’s passion that has led to great products from him and his team.
8. John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Office for Novell – a nice mix of company specific and generic content. Has good content for marketing folks.
9. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO, Naukri.com – a personal blog, unfortunately not updated frequently
10. David Neeleman, Founder and Chairman of JetBlue Airways – “Each week I fly on JetBlue flights and talk to customers so I can find out how we can improve our airline. This is my flight log”, one post a month, however unfortunately last updated in Oct 2007.

Corporate blogs (in no particular order):

• Tata Interactive Systems – combination of blog and corporate website
• Infosys – lots of technology channels
• Wipro Campusarena – surprisingly reads like a blog. Aims to facilitate one-to-one interaction with Wipro’s Campus Hiring Team and Wiproites so that students get a taste of what working for Wipro is all about, the release added. As per their policy doc, “a platform for students to share and discuss information about life at Wipro Technologies and activities”.
• Southwest Airlines – “state of the art use of social media by a big company: a blog, Flickr pics, video, polls, news and more”, could well be a company website, doesn’t quite have the feel of a blog.
• Dell – a blog about Dell products, services and customers

Interesting links about CEO/Corporate blogs

• Should CEOs blog? Seth Godin gives a short and sweet about why blogs work and why CEO blogs might not succeed. He says blogs when they are based on Candour, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy. Interestingly Seth Godin’s blog does not invite comments.
• Blogging India: A Windows Live Report – opens a Microsoft Word document, a November 2006 report on India’s blogosphere.
• Mark White provides an Anatomy of a Corporate Blog: Layers and Building Blocks.
• Top 15 Corporate Blogs (based on Technorai rankings) – on Mario Sunder’s blog (Community Evangelist at LinkedIn)
• Mario Sunder, Community Evangelist at LinkedIn – a great resource for learning about corporate / CEO blogging
• Debbie Weil’s top 8 tips for corporate blogging in 2008.