There is so much talk lately about how your learning organization or human resource organization should utilize blogging. Questions abound like:
- What strategy should the learning and human resource department have with regard to blogging?
- What guidelines should be in place for how your employees blog, i.e. what topics to stay away from and how to use blogging as a way to build stronger bonds with your customers?
Often I hear comments like, “my leadership is afraid of blogging,” or “we have strict rules allowing a small number of senior people to blog and our department is not included in this small number of senior executives.”
It seems to me there are some larger questions you should be addressing like:
- Does your CEO know what a blog is?
- Should your CEO have a blog?
- Has your CEO blog been reviewed in the blogosphere?
- Do your top three competitor CEO’s have blogs?
- Are these competitor CEO blogs a corporate communications tool or does the CEO really post about significant issues?
Interesting questions to ponder as more companies begin experimenting with social media to develop trust, improve communications and increase vehicles for employee development.
To find out about what your competitor CEO’s are doing in terms of blogging, I recommend you go to TheNewPR CEOBlogsList Wiki.
To date, 58 of the Fortune 500 companies have blogs. But in most cases, the blogs are company blogs, many maintained by corporate communications departments (like Clorox, which has one that answers questions about stains), rather than CEO’s penning their own blogs.
But there are notable exceptions and two CEO’s come to mind that regularly post to their blogs. One is Jonathan Schwartz CEO of Sun Microsystems who posts on a regular basis about his interactions with customers around the world. The other is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and CEO of HDNet.
As you continue to research what strategy to adopt and to create a set of guidelines with regard company blogging, I recommend consulting a survey recently conducted by content security company,
Clearswift.
The survey was conducted among 939 corporate decision-makers on matters related to corporate blogging, wiki’s and participation in online networks/forums and other aspects of the so-called Web 2.0. Some highlights from the survey found:
- 20 percent of IT and business decision-makers don’t have a policy governing appropriate use of the Internet, including social media sites
- 39 percent of IT and business decision-makers consider social media to be relevant to today’s corporate environment, while 36 percent do not see social media as relevant to their businesses
- 13 percent of organizations are not aware of social media and have no policy on it
So before your begin to develop a policy for your Human Resources and/or Corporate Learning department regarding blogging, wiki’s and other social media, first find out what your company policy is regarding the usage of social media at work. For Human Resource and Corporate Learning professionals, I find the Sun blog policy to be highly informative.
Finally, let’s continue a dialogue on CEO’s as Bloggers:
- Should more CEO’s be bloggers?
- Should this be part of their job in next 5 years?
- Should CEO bloggers participate as part of a corporate communications strategy or use blogging to begin a “real” dialogue with customers?
- And how can Human Resource and Corporate Learning departments “experiment” in their own departments about innovative ways to leverage social media at work while maintaining security standards?
