Was delighted to participate in SearchCamp Philly, part of PodCamp Philly, over the weekend. It was a perfect way to spend a rainy, stormy Saturday as Hurricane Hannah swept up the East Coast. Took the train up and back from D.C. and somehow missed the rain and wind.

I ran a session on the viability of CEO blogging, a topic that has been much discussed over the past several years and about which there is little agreement. Should your CEO blog? It depends on his/her writing ability, personality, motivation, goals. Should your CEO’s blog be ghostwritten? I say no, although some editing is fine.

(Above, my list of attributes of a bad CEO or corporate blog on the whiteboard at SearchCampPhilly. Before I’d finished writing, everyone at the session identified what the list represented.)

Unfortunately, there are no reliable stats on the number of CEO blogs, although the New PR Wiki has a CEO blog list. The Wall Street Journal published a short list of public and private company CEO blogs.

Also ran a Blog Clinic with Geoff Livingston where we “live critiqued” two very different blogs (here and here) submitted by willing parties. The biggest mistake we saw? The lack of links embedded in their blog entries. Interesting how that basic tenet of good blogging—linking—is not widely understood.

Update: just looked at Blabrmouth.com, one of the blogs Geoff and I critiqued. Seems blog publisher Robert Barr has already changed the design of the blog AND started adding links to his posts. Kudos!