Leadership Blogging | Wigley and Associates

Looking back and looking ahead at executive blogging: the missing link is leadership

By Griff Wigley, on September 1st, 2010

Debbie Weil, corporate social media consultant and author of the recently updated The Corporate Blogging Book (now on my Kindle), tweeted this on Monday:

9 years since my 1st article about blogging on Aug. 22, 2001: To Blog or Not to Blog http://bit.ly/cgL88M Yr thots on what has changed – ?

Weil was prescient with her 2001 ClickZ article To Blog or Not to Blog… That’s a Good Question. She not only saw blogs as potent corporate marketing tools but saw the possibility of them being used by executives:

So how does this translate to your email marketing program? If your objective is customer retention and you are sending an e-newsletter to your house list, you could easily include a link to your CEO’s blog — or a blog by another executive in your company who has a keen wit, writes with style, and has something to say.

In 2006, Weil wrote in her book:

Ideally, the blog attaches a voice to the company through the words and style of the executive writing it. A legitimate question to ask, however, is this: Is a CEO blog "the" voice of the company? What about employee blogs? Perhaps it’s better to say that a CEO blog can help tell the story of the company. The story you want customers and the media to listen to. It’s a subtle difference, but it touches on one of the most oft touted reasons for a large corporation to blog–giving the company a human voice.

Yesterday, Jennifer Van Grove, Associate Editor at Mashable, published an article titled How CEOs Will Use Social Media in the Future.

Van Grove quotes from last May’s Mashable interview with Forrester CEO George Colony titled Should CEOs Be Fluent in Social Media? about how few top executives use social media, noting that "social media abstinence even appears to extend to CEOs of tech companies."

She brings in the age and attitude factor (which Colony raised as well):

When it comes to CEOs, there’s a vast disparity between the young ones heading up startups and the more seasoned CEOs running the world’s most powerful companies. That disparity is social media — the young are more versed than the old. The difference between the two groups can be attributed to different generations and different attitudes around content and information meant for the public and private domains.

But she fails to mention that in that interview, as well as on Colony’s blog here, that he also notes that the CEO’s of social media companies are less than avid social media users:

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is active on his platform but doesn’t blog and infrequently visits Twitter. Evan Williams of Twitter Tweets several times per day and blogs, but hasn’t posted in 2010. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn uses Twitter several times per week and posts to the LinkedIn corporate blog. Mike Jones, co-CEO of MySpace is on Twitter several times per week and has a blog (though no posts this year).

I don’t know the ages of Weiner and Jones but Williams is 30-something and Zuckerberg is 20-something. These guys are not only extremely versed in social media but Williams (Blogger and Twitter) and Zuckerberg (Facebook) were among the creators of it.

So it doesn’t seem, as Van Grove asserts, that lack of executive blogging/social media use is solely because of "different generations and different attitudes around content and information."

I’d argue that it’s because executives of all generations have not considered how these technologies can be used as leadership tools. They only see them as marketing/public relations tools and once a company gets to a certain size, few CEO’s engage directly in PR on a daily basis.

Van Grove lauds the tweeting of Livestrong CEO Doug Ulman but he doesn’t appear to blog and I seriously doubt that he spends much time reading or personally responding to the tweets of his 38,000+ followers. As I blogged last month, the social networking part of social media is a problem for most executives.

Van Grove asks Edelman Digital’s Senior VP Steve Rubel what he thinks the use of social media will be by executives in the future:

While bullish on CEOs making organizational changes to better incorporate social media, Rubel does not see reason to predict a huge uptick in social media broadcasting from the CEOs themselves. “I see CEOs more laying the groundwork in vision and process than necessarily participating actively themselves,” asserts Rubel.

That’s because Rubel sees the world of social media through the lens of public relations. Others, like that geezer CEO Paul Levy, see it through the lens of leadership.

Debbie Weil saw that a blog could give an organization a human voice. We now need executives to see that a blog can help them lead an organization with human voice.

Using blogs and Twitter to leverage your influence as a leader: rationale from Seth Godin and Michael Hyatt

By Griff Wigley, on July 21st, 2010

Michael Hyatt is CEO of the Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson Publishers and recently gave a speech titled “Social Media and Your Ministry.” A preview of that speech was captured in this video of an interview, blogged at How Can Christian Leaders Get Started with Social Media? (Stephen Bateman blogged this last week in a FutureBook post titled Tweet tweet – follow my leader. Thanks to personal/professional coach Tim Pearson for the tweet about it.)

Hyatt says in the video that “Twitter may be greatest leadership tool ever invented” in part because it’s “a marvelous way to leverage your influence as a leader.”

(The title of the video makes one think it’s all about ‘how to get started’ but the most important pieces are related to why.)

The only other person I know of who’s written about blogs (and now Twitter which, after all, is a microblogging service) as tools for leveraging one’s influence as a leader is Seth Godin in his book, Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas. (I blogged about this back in 2006, Leadership blogging and the leveraged effort curve.)

Godin originally wrote about this for his blog back in March of 2005: Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve:

Knowledge workers get paid extra when they show insight or daring or do what others can’t. But packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not particularly enjoyable for most people. As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.

… The exception?

The intense conversations you can have with your customers and prospects, especially via a blog. Once you get the system and the structure set up, five minutes of effort can give you four minutes of high-leverage idea time in front of the people you’re trying to influence.

The book adds this to that last sentence: “This is pure, unadulterated leverage. The stuff you actually get paid for, with no overhead.”

Godin’s insight — “among highly-compensated workers, the percentage of the [knowledge] work you get paid to do goes down as you get paid more” and that “packaging the knowledge is expensive, time consuming and not particularly enjoyable” — was stunning to me and still is.

In the Why keep a blog? section of my 2005 Leadership Blogging Guide (currently under revision as a White Paper), my #1 reason to blog is to “Leverage your leadership interactions that otherwise disappear.”

In the course of any leader’s week, there are literally hundreds of interactions with colleagues, constituents, staff, media and other members of community. Whether these interactions are face-to-face, phone, electronic or paper-based, they comprise the bulk of how leaders exhibit their day-to-day influence. A phone call from a constituent, a conversation with a staff member at lunch, an email exchange with a colleague, an off-topic discussion at a team meeting – all likely evaporate into thin air, for all intents and purposes, as soon as they’re concluded. Even most paper documents such as memos and reports are quickly relegated to the trash, the shredder, or the filing cabinet, never to be seen again.

With a blog, leaders can select from among this never-ending parade of interactions the ones that they deem strategically significant, and give them a longer “shelf-life.” With a posting to their blog, the story of the interaction gains immediate wider audience while making it significantly easier for that audience to pass the story around to others who they think should know about it.

Prospective civic leader bloggers frequently ask, "How much time is blogging going to require?" It’s a fair question. Blogging feels like just another task when you first start out, and it does require some time commitment to work it into your week.

But once you experience feedback from your blogging, that not only are others reading your blog but that it’s starting to have influence, your attitude towards the task of blogging changes because it becomes strategic.

"I’m going to blog this because I know that she’ll read it and pass it on to…"

"When this group of people sees what I’ve blogged about this, then they’re more likely to…"

You start to realize that your blog leverages your leadership strategies in time-effective ways.

Among other reasons why a leader should blog/tweet is that the tools allow you to:

Use a voice of authenticity to have a one-to-one conversation with an audience
Extend your presence with a selective window into your day
Provide another way for people to interact with you
Convey your message directly to your audience instead depending on media institutions

More to come.

Blogging For Leaders: a new interactive learning environment

By Griff Wigley, on September 7th, 2009

I’ve set up a new site called Blogging For Leaders (BLF). It’s an interactive learning environment (ILE) designed to help people use blogs and other social media tools in their roles as leaders.

I’ve been a leadership blogging coach since 2003, and have worked with business and non-profit executives, politicians, government officials, education administrators, small business owners, and community leaders.

I’m taking what I’ve learned (and what my clients have taught me) and putting it into a structured online course. And I will be wrapping an online community of learners around it with a web forum where I’ll moderate the discussions, provide some coaching, and gather ongoing feedback on how to improve the offering.

Currently, the course and forum are only open to those leaders associated with a couple of my client organizations

That will change later this fall.

Leadership blogging tour wraps up in Grand Rapids, MN

By Griff Wigley, on April 26th, 2009

I finished my leadership blogging tour for Northern Community Internet on Friday with a presentation to a full-house of 30-40 people at the Grand Rapids Area Library, a very cool-looking library with a giant red chair outside. (Click any of the photo thumbnails to enlarge and the scroll through the images.)

Afterwards, I had lunch next door with the staff at KAXE, Northern Community Radio, and lucked out to be there for volunteer chef Charlie Lano’s catered home-made lunch. (That’s Charlie standing to the right of Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager.)

A tip-of-the-blogger hat to Ross Williams, one of the planners/project managers for Northern Community Internet, who handled all the arrangements for my visit. (Photo is from the MN Voices UnConference, courtesy of Marc Osten, original here.)

Heading up north: presentations on leadership blogging

By Griff Wigley, on April 20th, 2009

I’ll be in the northern Minnesota cities of Bemidji, Brainerd, and Grand Rapids later this week, doing presentations on leadership blogging for the Northern Community Internet, “a network of northern Minnesota communities using the internet to connect to our neighbors and with one another.” It’s a project of KAXE Northern Community Radio and funded by the Blandin Foundation. My invitation came from Ross Williams who I first met two years ago during an all-day visit to Blandin when the project was just being conceived.

My presentation is based on my 2005 U.K. Civic Leadership Blogging Guide (25-page PDF). Last fall, I collaborated with Gallomanor, colleagues in the U.K.. to produce an updated version of that, a 32-page booklet (PDF) called CivicSurf. It’s primarily oriented towards elected councilors but applicable for anyone in a leadership position.

If you’re looking for something that’ll give you a taste of what I’ll be covering in the presentation, the CivicSurf booklet would be your best bet.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a generic leadership blogging presentation, so I’m in the middle of updating it to include new examples from a variety of bloggers, many based here in Minnesota and a few from afar.