To blog, or not to blog

One of my clients, the CEO of a CAD/CAM software company, recently asked a very basic, but pretty good question. Why should I blog? What will I gain that I don’t already have? Let’s start with the following:

1) You’re a CEO. People care about what you think, because the thought processes that lead to the decisions you make affect the entire future direction of your company, everyone who works there, all of your customers, and all of your channel partners. All of these people matter, all of them care about what’s going through your head, and a blog is an easy and effortless way to reach them.

2) If you do this, you will stick way out of the crowd. Very few CEOs blog. Up to this point the blogosphere (the business side of it) is dominated by geeks arguing about technical nits. The conversations get very involved, and there is usually a lot of good feedback and information generated. You can easily test out new ideas and concepts by crowd-sourcing strategic input. At a minimum, your customers will jump all over this, and that’s a great source of high-value input.

3) Thought leadership. Any company is part of a larger ecosystem; competitors, potential allies, customers, etc. are always swimming around you. Want to set the tone and direction for strategic evolution and growth within your ecosystem? Blog on, CEO, it’s very likely your counterparts aren’t even looking at blogs as a strategic communications vehicle, which give you the chance to grab the moral high ground.

4) As a CEO you’re busy and don’t have the time for this, right? Wrong. Of all the people in your company who communicate with the outside world, none is more important than you. You need to make the time to do this, and you need to do it ASAP. Care for a suggestion on a time-saver? Get a speech-to-text application. I use one, it takes me about 60 seconds to speak three paragraphs of commentary, and another four or five minutes to clean up and edit. Want to be even more efficient? Record your blog while commuting to work and download it to a STT application. Depending on how fast ideas go through your head, you could get a months worth of blogs done in one morning of what is otherwise usually dead time.

Like any new (or not so new anymore) technology, blogs are still looked on with suspicion by non-technical people who are otherwise very business savvy. You need to get past this, and get past it quickly; blogging can become an incredibly powerful tool for any CEO, or anyone who is looking to influence the influencers.