Why and how you should prevent your CEO from blogging
That chummy yet authoritative initial post brims with inspiration and wisdom; then the tepid follow-up straggles in nine weeks later. Soon your team will be ghostwriting. Head it off now.
It’s conference season, and for communicators that means two things:
Intranets across the land are populated by the ghosts of well-intended executive blogs. The first two or three are brilliant, rambling discussions about life, leadership, competition and global markets. Then they start getting a little shorter, a little more urgent and a lot less frequent. The final post from sometime in 2014 is a terse plea to submit timesheets properly.
CEO blogs have three unfortunate tendencies that we need recognize up front and either resolve or use as the reason they should find something else to do.
The tendency to be pointless
Though many blogs have little apparent point to them, CEO blogs have a particular habit of being about nothing. These Seinfelds of the corporate communications landscape wander from rousing calls to arms to lectures about frugality to watery holiday greetings.
Like most pointless things, they are ignored, precisely because they offer no value for the time invested. Ask your excited CEO these questions to determine whether his or her blog is likely to be pointless:
The tendency to need resources
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