In an AP story that ran this morning in the San Jose Mercury News and dozens of other papers (yes that’s an AP photo at left), reporter Rachel Konrad writes that Sun’s CEO told her:
“The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to
communicate to all of our constituencies – developers, media, analysts
and shareholders,” Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley
office. “When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall
Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my
blog, they almost universally say yes.”
I’m a believer on this one. I believe that Jonathan writes the blog himself. And that if he can’t precisely measure his ROB (return on blog), it’s definitely having a PR impact.
I spoke with Rachel at some length for her article – fun. I gave her the link to the Fortune 500 blogging wiki, which she references. And also told her about one of my favorite CEO bloggers, Berkshire Publishing CEO Karen Christensen, whom she quotes. She did a nice job on the story.
Rachel quotes me as follows:
“Ultimately, a good blog is good writing. Most CEOs are not good
writers,” said Debbie Weil, a Washington-based consultant and author of
“The Corporate Blogging Book.”“The packaging and controlling of the corporate message has always
been done for them, so often they don’t realize that writing well is
hard work and takes time and thought and practice,” said Weil.
She also quotes fellow blogging expert Dave Taylor who adds his two cents to the article in a riff on “Why Jonathan Schwartz Should NOT Be Blogging.” Needless to say, I don’t agree. Dave loves to be a contrarian.
Useful Links
If you can’t get to the San Jose Mercury News article without registering, try reading the story:
– on CNN
– on MSN.com
– on BusinessWeek.com
– in the Houston Chronicle
– in Newsday
– in the Miami Herald
– in the Washington Post
– in Euro2day (published in Greece)
Earlier blog entry: The three biggest challenges for CEO bloggers are discipline, passion and writing ability
If you care…
Jonathan’s blog now
features a drop-down in the header to translate it into 10 other
languages. When I checked this morning, it still wasn’t translating his
blog entries.
The AP editors must have noticed. They changed the headline of the story from the original “At communication’s vanguard, Sun CEO’s blog goes international” to “Sun CEO among the few chiefs who blog.” As a former reporter, I find that kinda interesting.