The blogoplex is reacting to the Business Week blog post entitled: "The Business Blog Backlash is Nigh." In it, Stephen Baker says, "It's the rare CEO who has the time and energy and openness to blog." He cites our boy Bob Lutz's decreasing blogging frequency as evidence.
Baker's correct. And incomplete.
Back in graduate school, my mentor, Antos Rancurello, taught me many valuable lessons. One in particular was as follows: in order to be successful at anything, one must possess three elements: Time, Interest and Talent. Lacking any of these in a degree appropriate to succeeding at the particular task, one will fail. Essentially still being fixated at an adolescent level of development at the time, I came to call this the T.I.T. Principle.
Let's apply the T.I.T. Principle to CEO blogging.
Time - Ask any blogger how much time it takes to blog on a regular basis and you'll almost undoubtedly hear, "a lot!" (Scientific bunch, these bloggers!) Fact is, if you write three or more 200-500 word posts per week on topics other than the current content of your consciousness, you'll spend anywhere from 2-5 hours writing. Jazz up your posts with images, graphics, links to other posts and the like, and you'll jack that time up quickly. And, that's just writing posts. Add to that replying to comments, wading through RSS feeds, reading other blogs, and so on, and you're up to ten or more hours per week. Too much time for the typical CEO to spend on blogging.
Interest - Spending that much time per week on anything requires sustained motivation. I'm interested in blogging as a social phenomenon and as a business development tool. I'm a psychologist, so, hearing people's voices (and expressively using my own) is of interest to me, regardless of the medium. Most CEOs aren't. Blogging as a valuable business development tool is still an open question for most CEOs, lacking the hard "evidence" most need to justify the significant time investment. So, CEOs are not likely to be all that interested in blogging.
Talent - Like any expressive medium, blogging has its own melody, timbre and rhythm. There are many kinds of blogs, but the ones I find most engaging are a mixture of seriousness and irreverence. I like to hear ideas batted around creatively, with clarity and wit. The blogger's "conversational voice" is critical to the blog's success. While some CEOs may have a knack for this kind of expression (and I think Lutz, while not a CEO, is a senior executive whose style fits the medium very well), most don't. The "corporate speak"...circumspect, foggy, obscure, guarded...that most CEOs are forced to use (or believe they are) is antithetical to the tone that makes blogs refreshing.
So, it's not surprising that we see so few successful examples of CEO blogging. Because most CEOs are likely to lack the Time, Interest and/or Talent necessary to be successful bloggers, I'd say most CEOs shouldn't blog.
But then again, most CEOs shouldn't do most of the things that are necessary for their businesses to be successful.
Recent Comments