A lot of CEOs seem to shy away from blogging. And a lot of PR teams keep asking, “Why?” Actually, it’s understandable: the head honcho must always represent the entire company, and that’s a lot of pressure for a writer. The real question should be: How can a CEO blog by day and still sleep at night?
Enter Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters. Glocer is the head of a vast team of top-notch writers, yet he still produces an engaging blog without fear. His secret? He never talks business.
“We are all subject to a lot of official communications these days from companies,” Glocer says at Tom Glocer’s Blog. “All too often, these are ghost-written passages concocted by overeager PR machines.” Well, that doesn’t happen in this blog. Glocer alone writes it, and he only writes about “what interests me.”
Is it working? Well, a recent two-part report on father/daughter bonding, including his account of their Night at the Museum together, has so far garnered close to 1,000 pageviews. Not bad.
“I imagine much of my audience will be internal at Thomson Reuters,” he notes in his intro. But that’s OK, too. He’s letting the blog determine its audience. “My real aim is to engage in an electronic dialog with whomever [sic] wants to comment on a post or otherwise share their views,” he concludes.
It’s OK to be you, even at the top. Engaging blogs like this one help prove the point that above all, blogging works best when it’s personal and individual.
Source: Tom Glocer’s Blog.