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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Blogging is at the forefront of what has been termed Web 2.0, where user-generated media becomes increasingly prominent on the Internet. This article examines the growth of blogging and what it means for executives and their companies. This study reports the first comprehensive survey of CEO blogging to date, finding that as of mid-2007, over 50 top corporate executives are writing their own blogs. The article looks at the unique issues involved with corporations having their CEOs blog. The paper concludes with the author looking ahead to the not-so-distant future when blogging will become a mainstream part of executive communications.
Keywords: Blogs, Blogging, Web 2.0, Management Communications, Marketing, Strategic Management
INTRODUCTION
Whether it is termed by analysts as Web 2.0, user- or consumer-generated media or social networks, there is a vast sea change occurring in Internet technology, wherein the web has become a truly participatory media. Blogs are certainly at the forefront of the Web 2.0 movement. According to Mort Zuckerman (2005), Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report: "Blogs are transforming the way Americans get information and think about important issues. It's a revolutionary change and there's no turning back" (n.p.).
The statistics on blogging are close to mind-boggling. According to the blog analyst firm Technorati, a new blog is created every second of every day. Every hour, 54,000 posts are made to blogs, meaning that there are 1.3 million new blog posts each day. All told, the blogosphere - the totality of all blogs - continues to double in size every six months. With approximately 60 million blogs in existence today, the blogosphere is an astonishing sixty times larger in size than it was a mere three years ago (see Figure 1) (Sifry, 2006). Approximately half of all blogs are 'active,' in that they have been updated in the last 90 days, with approximately 13 percent having been updated to on a weekly basis (Perrone, 2005). The blogosphere is also a very international environment, for while English is the leading language of blogging, it is by no means the dominant language, with Japanese and Chinese bloggers close behind those in the U.S. and Europe (Sifry, 2006).
The trend is clear that the blogosphere will continue to grow, and with that...