Senior Manager blogs and non-blogs
February 22, 2010A short while ago Stephan Schillerwein wrote a blog post entitled “Recipe for failure, the senior management blog on the intranet“. Following on from Stephan’s post and the conversation that followed, I’d like to share some comments based on my experience with very large organizations and some numbers from this year’s report “Global Intranet Trends for 2010“.
Why do large enterprises lead?
Large organizations have major challenges in communication.
Top-down
communication is hard for two reasons: (1) there are lots of
intermediaries in the flow, e.g.divisional, regional and local
communication managers, and (2) there is an intuitive reticence, even
mistrust in some cases, of what comes “down” from the HQ office. Bottom-up communication is equally hard because what starts at the bottom often stays at the bottom.
The figures in this year’s report clearly show that senior managers in many large organizations are using blogs to improve communication flow, to break through some of the barriers and silos. However, there is still a lot some of them need to learn about blogging!
Blogging at 45%, senior bloggers lower
45 percent of the survey population at the end of 2009 reported having internal blogs. The figures in the chart represent the 131 enterprises with internal blogs out of the full survey population of 283 enterprises worldwide.
Details: Senior managers in very large organizations (over 30,000 employees) are more likely to blog than those in smaller organizations. In the first segment, 10 percent of the organizations using social media report having “quite a few” senior manager blogs and nearly 50 percent “a few”. In the medium-small group: none responded “quite a few” and 15 percent responded “a few”.
The blog usages that differ the most are “distribution of news” 80 percent (medium-small: 60 percent), and “collecting feedback” nearly 70 percent (medium-small: nearly 40 percent).
Senior manager bloggers aim to show transparency and engage people
The purposes of the senior management blogs:
• Talking about strategic issues (83 percent)
• Showing openness & transparency (77 percent)
• Sharing opinions, engaging people (74 percent)
• Sharing news and updates (54 percent)
• Sharing expertise and experience (38 percent).
Some senior manager blogs are not blogs
Not all the senior managers write their own posts. They do not always respond to comments and questions on the blog. Comments from survey participants show different approaches to senior manager blogs
« We absolutely require that senior manager bloggers write their own posts. No ghostwriting allowed!
« CEO blog is written for him – and comments that purport to come from CEO are also written for him.
« Have started experimenting in the last nine months – becoming quite competitive! Although most of the senior manager blogs are open to comments or questions, the senior manager actually responds less than half the time.
« Employees are encouraged to ask questions, but via forms or e-mail, not open comments.
« Posts from senior managers and the board tend to attract a lot of comments which they are happy to respond to.
« The CEO’s blog doesn’t allow comments so communication is in one direction only – I don’t know if you would categorize this as a true blog, although that’s what it’s been dubbed.
Most senior manager bloggers blog 1 to 3 times a month
And you?
What is happening in your organization? Do you have a lot of senior manager blogs and are they really blogs?
February 22nd, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Very interesting post. Here in Sweden I’m not really seeing that many senior managers actually blog. There’s a blog at Saltå Kvarn that is written by the CEO (in Swedish) and that really engages with people. Other than that, it’s mainly being used as rather bland and boring company blogs here. Slight variations of Latest News.
I’ve ghost written one of the major university VCs blogs but I don’t really want to go into details about that in public ! Suffice to say, it felt rather strange.
The intranets I’ve seen also tend to be rather bland when it comes to CEOs getting down and writing. Often, they’re ghost written too and are very one way in the communications they send out. It’s not about being social or engaging.
February 24th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Blogs are usually (?) published to engage with peer groups with similiar interests, who welcome the opportunity to respond direct to the blog.
The CEO should be blogging to his direct reports, and perhaps one level below. When the CEO blogs to the entire company then that is not blogging, it’s publishing without using either email or the intranet itself.
I have come across a few CEO blogs where the CEO manages to write really engaging copy. Usually they are CEOs who manage by walking around and/or have very visible “open door” policies. They also encourage comments on the blog platform itself, and all staff respect this openess and respond constructively
As a final thought, if the CEO ends up having to blog about news, strategic issues etc, then what role is internal communications playing?