The Silence of the Wolves

Why shouldn’t an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short.

These were the words used by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in his first blog entry made a little over two years ago. The question that Schwartz raised seemed a little more daring two years ago than it does in 2006 - at first glance. After all, podcasting and vlogs have since then been added to the bag of online publication technologies and one could conclude that blogs are basically mainstream now.

Not in the corporate world.

Yes, there is a considerable level of new- and old-media hype about this new thing called corporate blogging. And yes, a new CRM-, product- or image-blog is launched almost daily by some major corporate player. But while PR departments from San Francisco to Sindelfingen seem to be at least curious and at best ecstatic, the men (and a few women) at the helms of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are rather quiet, a fact recently lamented by the New York Times. Some talk to their employees through an internal blog, but most prefer to pass the pen (or in this case the keyboard) to their ‘communication professionals’.

The question of course is why communication should not be at the top of the agenda for CEOs. When giving his reasons for starting his blog, Schwartz noted that he wanted to get unfiltered feedback from the community. Unfiltered, huh? If we suppose that the motive of Sun’s top dog is genuine (and his impressive track record as a blogger - at least in terms of how much he’s posted over the last two years - makes that seem plausible) it suggests that there’s a whole lot of filtering going on in old-world corporate communication. Of course blogging is not some magical wand you wave that makes such a communicative insulation magically dissapear. And it seems unlikely that many executives would even want that - after all, who really wants to listen the rants of disgruntled consumers and the diatribes of anonymous blog lurkers? But if Schwartz came to the realization that talking to people directly (whether that directness is real or just feels like it is) can actually be good for business, others will eventually follow, even if they are two years late and lack Schwartz’s dedication - a dedication that may well have to do with Sun’s problems as a company and Schwartz’s need to explain the massive restructuring he is undertaking to shareholders, employees and customers.

I’ll be looking at other blogging CEOs in the near future, and at why not just any executives should consider following the example of people like Schwartz and John Mackey.