The only thing better than the snowy, Lake Tahoe views this morning was finding this reference to the Mark Logic CEO Blog on one of the top Internet blogs, ReadWriteWeb.
Dave Kellogg Advises Corporate Bloggers to Get Real
Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, suggests that many corporations have latched onto the blogging phenomenon as a means to regurgitate their standard corporate messages. Blogging this way doesn’t work and if you’re considering doing it – don’t. As a CEO who has been blogging for over three years, Dave’s words are well worth noting. His blogging style is also well worth emulating.
Dave’s recommendations:
If you’re going to make a corporate blog, go real or go home.
There is no point in ghost-written or PR-written blogs.
In my view, corporate blogs shouldn’t exist. If you want a corporate blog, go find a few corporate bloggers instead.
Encourage those bloggers to write openly and honestly about your industry.
Let them ramble off-topic once in a while. You might discover something.
I received this question the other day from an old friend:
Clearly, having [our CEO] write his own real blog would be ideal, but do you think it’s possible that a ghost-written blog is better than nothing at all, or is the downside not worth it? If you’re against it, [do you have] any ideas on how to explain it to him (and the marketing team pushing for it) … ? And if you think it’s doable, [do you have] any advice to him/the writers?
My short answer is a vehement no. If your CEO is going to have a blog then it should be his or her own. Why? Because, in a word, to do otherwise would be misleading.
The promise of a blog is connection and interaction with the author on topics of shared interest.
Readers expect blogs to actually be written by their stated authors.
If the marketing / PR team writes the blog, it will — with all due respect — probably end up easily identified as marketing-produced pabulum, rephrasing and reinforcing company press releases. Odds are you can’t bluff this, so you shouldn’t try.
Even if you have a highly talented and knowledgeable person write the blog it will fail to capture the CEO’s voice. When people meet me, they feel like they know me (and in a sense they actually do) because of the blog.
If the CEO simply wishes to air a few corporate thoughts every once in a while, you could accomplish that goal with a “CEO corner” in a corporate newsletter or on the company’s website.
If, on the other hand, the company wants to use a blog to comment on industry topics of interest that aren’t necessarily appropriate for its own corporate website, then why not create a corporate blog — i.e., the company X corporate blog. With this solution, you’re not misleading the audience: they know they’re reading a corporate blog, and you can make it a multi-contributor blog where, perhaps every once in a while, the CEO weighs in.
If, despite these arguments, you are hell-bent on a ghost-written CEO blog, then I do have this advice.
Only write posts that are the direct result of live interviews with the CEO on topics that he or she chooses.
Instruct the writer to suppress his/her own voice and instead work very hard to capture the voice of the CEO — in tone, in diction, and in style.
Dave Kellogg is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Service Cloud at Salesforce.com. From 2004 to 2010, I was CEO at unstructured information leader MarkLogic, taking the company from zero to $80M in run-rate revenues.
Before that, I was CMO at Business Objects as we grew from 250 to over 4,500 people and $30M in revenues to over $1B. Prior to that, I was VP of Marketing at Versant, where we executed a chasm-crossing strategy that resulted in a successful IPO. I started my career in both technical and marketing positions at Ingres.
In addition, I sat on the board of big data analytics provider Aster Data until its successful sale to Teradata for $325M. I also do some angel investing and advise the chief executives of several startups.
This blog is written by Dave Kellogg and covers a mix of topics including search, big data, social enterprise, marketing, and customer service technologies along with commentary on Silicon Valley, venture capital, and the business of software.
