It’s interesting to see that many executives are now blogging. Many companies are now turning to blogs as PR, in addition to press releases. The reason is that blogs reach customers and those are the ones that businesses need to target in order to continue sustaining revenues and customer satisfaction. Press releases often only mention things which don’t damage a company’s reputation and censors the “real stuff” going on in the company. Think Enron and how they covered up their financial scandal. It forces the companies to be honest and talk the truth, and it also makes them held accountable. That’s what we need today in business, not lying executives who just want to inflate their salaries and bask in their corporate riches. In this chapter, Scoble and Israel talk about 2 executives who have very successful blogs. The first is Bob Lutz who is General Motors’ vice chairman where he communicates about GM to his readers and customers. According to Lutz, “In the age of the Internet anyone can be a journalist”.
Another prominent blogger in the corporate business is Mark Cuban, who is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA basketball team. Mark Cuban started to blog to set the records straight, because the media seems to say things that are not true about him, and distorts the message. So blogging allows the express the true opinions and is unbiased, something that we all know the media is not (think CNN, do you trust CNN?). Remember the movie Wag the Dog, where the election campaign was all based upon a fictitious war which was just made up?
Bloggers are passionate and are very open to suggestions. Sun Microsystems’ president, Jonathan Schwartz fits this personality perfectly. In fact, he made blogging a Sun strategic initiative as part of an effort to improve the image of Sun. Many developers and customers felt that Scott McNealy (the CEO) and Sun was losing their competitiveness and was off the tech radar. Schwartz wanted to change that and show that Sun is still alive and vibrant. Many people including rivals get insights into the company and has improved the company’s reputation as a faithful and authentic company. And that resonates well with attracting the industry’s top developers to use Sun software and hardware.
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