In the April issue of Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson wrote a fascinating feature article entitled "The See-Through CEO". It's a lengthy article - you can read it in its entirety here if you want. For those of you who don't have time to read the full version, his basic premise is that if you don't start blogging SOON as a company, you will lose out bigtime to your competition. Let me pull out a few quotes to get your juices flowing:
"Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong... Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak."
"Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you - and everyone trembles before search engine rankings."
"Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system."
"There's a whole class of CEOs who can hardly write an email. But I feel like in this new digital world, there are haves and have-nots, and people who can't write convincingly - they're leaving themselves defenseless. The people who clearly enjoy writing and blogging are like CEOs 2.0 - they have competitive advantage over other CEOs." - quoting Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm
"A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It's hard to trust anyone who doesn't list their dreams and fears on Facebook..."
"The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation."
"Network algorithms do not favor the cagey or secretive. They favor the prolific, the outgoing, the shameless... One bad blog post can kill you. But if you've got hundreds or thousands of sites linking to you and commenting on you, the law of averages takes over, and odds are the opinion will be accurate: The cranks will be outweighed by cooler heads. Again, the Net rewards the transparent."
The 'transparency' of the blog-world is intriguing. Transparency usually translates into intimacy, relationship and community. How 'real' are these values when built in techno-space? What friends in our physical space are we abandoning to pursue computer screen relationships? The whole 'blog world' has this modernity raised baby-boomer scratching his bald head!!! As THE communication tool of the future, there is obviously more for me to learn :)
Posted by: Bruce | June 09, 2007 at 10:37 AM