Blogs are still undiscovered by BEL20 Chief Executives. Our study shows none of them blogging, although CEOs of smaller companies are starting to engage. This opens a real possibility for first mover advantage and support from an active Belgian blog community.
Blogs make companies more human, a voice in the darkness and a way to reach out to your customers. There is also a possibility to engage with stories that affect a company’s reputation, build up visibility as well as real chance to get high search engine ranking. People will keep on telling their stories and by having their own blog, CEOs could tell their side, simply writing a blog helps to influence the message.
Most CEOs are aware (and maybe even a little afraid) of bloggers and yet they still hesitate to engage. There are nice arguments in the pro-blog camp given by Fiona Wash in the article “Why CEOs should learn to love the blogs”. There are also skeptics with arguments that CEOs should be busy with other activities, they aren’t journalists or PR departments frightened of what might be said, but is this not thinking from a different generation of command and control communication?
Corporate blogs are important and soon they will be even expected by clients. The situation is analogous with company websites a few years ago – in the early ‘90s very few companies had them, now it’s hard to imagine the world without them. “Without a blog as a part of your website, your company may appear walled off and disinterested in being open to comment and criticism”, says Debbie Weil in her book “The Corporate Blogging book”. (By the way thank you Debbie for the free copy of your book!)
If it is this important, there seems a real opportunity for someone to step up. Who knows, maybe there will be a blog launched by the time I finish this post…
July 30th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I agree with you. There should be more CEOs starting a blog.
Another belgian CEO who blogs is Jean-Louis Van Marcke from Bobex. The adress is: http://www.belgablog.be/. I also set up a list of corporate blogs in Belgium as a wiki. If you know other corporate blogs, feel free to add them to the list.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I forgot to add the adress to the wiki of corporate blogs. Here it is: http://corporateblogsbelgium.wetpaint.com/
July 31st, 2007 at 4:01 pm
We recently created a network of new media specialists to be able to provide corporate blogging and social media consultancy for Belgian CEO’s and companies. Check here for details: http://www.businessblogging.be/
August 1st, 2007 at 10:52 am
Thank you for your comment Tom. Unfortunately the Belgian environment is not too much different from the overall situation – take the Fortune 500 as an example http://www.eu.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi . According to this source only 40 out of 500 companies have active corporate blogs that makes just 8% in total. So the Belgians can catch up pretty quickly:-)
October 5th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I agree with you Monika. I come from Italy and now I live in Brussels but the situation in my country is the same. Many managers I met in the past thought that blogs are something useless for their jobs but they read normally blogs to get informations. It’s funny!! One of them said me that who surf around blogs have too much time to spend but not him because he worked hard all day long. I think they are too busy and too lazy to really understand what a blog should do for their activities.
I am surprised when some of them says “I am really interested in new media and today it’s impossible for our business to go ahead without using new media”…what do you mean when you talk about new media? “Internet and web site”.