CEO’s blog should be a mini-blog

Social media gurus keep speaking about corporate blogs all the time — CEOs should have one or at least assign the task of running a blog to their subordinates. Great! But what should a CEO write about and how should they do it? These questions are not discussed widely.

However, I have my own opinion about the corporate blogs I would like to share it with you.

First of all one should not concentrate one the text alone. Video converts much better than any text! A single picture can tell more than 15 tutorial pages. Writing articles also takes a lot of time. In many cases CEOs don’t even have time to write a paragraph, not to mention doing research and collecting data for a full article. It’s quite suspicious if a CEO can write a 2 pages post about their company, views, strategy, services, products, plans for the future; also answer readers’ questions, criticize the competitors, curse the government for the imperfect laws, analyze the industry, etc. Most likely such person is not a very good CEO and should probably seek a different career path.

CEO’s blog should be short, irregular, interesting, live and organic. How is this possible? It’s easy if you use a mini-blogging platform and a sharing bookmarklet – a special link in your browser’s bookmarks section, which can get the information from the page you are viewing.

A mini-blogging platform is almost the same as a blog, only it makes sharing the media much easier. Of course no one restricts you from writing a 5 pages-long article, but the name mini-blog implies that you should keep it simple and concise. In many cases mini-blogging is considered to be the same as micro-blogging (e.g. twitter). However, micro-blogging has a lot more limits. Text and comment length is limited, the links must be as short as possible, therefore a URL shortener is necessary. Other media cannot be embedded into the text. In other words, micro-blogging is a collection of different services and in most cases it is based on conversation. Mini-blog, however, is more of a discussion-based means of communication, where all kinds of media can be embedded easily. Whereas in regular blogs, one will usually need some HTML knowledge just to embed the video.

Company’s CEO should choose an easy to understand and manage tool with basic features, which would not take a lot of valuable CEO’s time. It takes some time to learn how to use a platform such as WordPress; there are way too many tools for twitter; while Tumblr seems to be the best option. It only takes a couple clicks to post some quotes from various websites and comment them or to post a video from YouTube. You can also easily integrate twitter stream.

There are many more nice and useful features on Tumblr to be mentioned. For example, Facebook application, iPhone app, mobile publishing via text message or email, desktop widget for Mac users. Voice post is also an incredible feature < you can call to an international phone number and leave a voice message. Tumblr also has a third party application directory full of useful tools.

Posterous and Publr are some of the known Tumblr competitors, but they do not have that many users probably due to the lack of features. One other thing to know about Tumblr is that they care about the content quality, so it is not advisable to try and sell your products or services on Tumblr blog, as you might get banned. Unless of course your content is in the language other than English.

The most important feature in mini-blogging platforms is the internal subscription to other users’ blogs (but you can also use RSS). Building the network of followers is very important, because they will be the ones to spread your information to their networks. Re-posting someone else’s posts is as easy as it is in Twitter, except you have many more possibilities.

CEO blogs should use services like Tumblr to save time while remaining interactive and innovative. There are other benefits of choosing Tumblr too.

Here are some of the companies that already chose Tumblr:

• Big Champagne Media Measurement




• Bickbot




• Wave Tribe