This is my inaugural blog. At this point I am not sure where this is going to go. My initial thoughts are to share with anyone who cares to read my blog my tips for entrepreneurs that I have learned (mostly the hard way) as a serial entrepreneur for the last almost 20 years. I also plan on spouting off with my views on business, the economy and politics. Finally, I will keep you up to speed as to what I am up to with my latest ventures (within the confines of the law in the case of any publicly traded situations).
Blogging has become ubiquitous. Everyone is doing it in the US. Canadians, at least Canadian journalists and political junkies, have jumped on the bandwagon. Corporate blogging and blogging by CEOs has not really caught on in the Great White North. While I am not currently the CEO of a company, other than my own advisory business, I have quite a bit of experience as a CEO and I currently work with a handful of CEOs of fast growth companies as I help them in their quest to take their companies to the next level. Its time for me to take the plunge and to become a blogger, perhaps as a way to inspire other entrepreneurs to do so.
Right now only one of my CEO clients or former clients are blogging. Razor Suleman's company I Love Rewards Inc. has a corporate blog. Razor, as CEO, is one of a number of authorized bloggers. The purpose of their blog is to:
- provide greater public awareness of their brand
- get external feedback about the things they do
- give their employees the ability to tell their story
They chose an initial roster of 7 authorized authors (including Razor), representing their vision committees. They implemented a policy document after studying examples from other well known companies such as Google. And then they got going - http://www.iloverewards.com/blog/.
Frankly, I was initially a little nervous about I Love Rewards blogging. What would people say? What would the comments be? Would a disgruntled employee air dirty laundry? Ten months later the I Love Rewards blog has been a great success.
Because of its success and my own exposure to blogging, I am moving into the blogosphere myself. Wish me luck.
Please read my upcoming column in Profit Magazine on blogging. I hope my column and my blogging will inspire you to start your own CEO or corporate blog. In any event, I invite you to comment on my blogs or columns right here in my blog.
2 comments:
Yes Dennis you should :-)
I just read your article in PROFIT
I am not a CEO, but an IT Manager in the SMB space. There are dozens of blogs out there dealing with Technology from both a "Tech Geek" theme, and from a VC theme - so I chose to blog on explaining the "black box" of technology to non-tech managers in the SMB space.
And businesses can build their brands - and raise awareness to if they carefully blog. Here is an example, a few Months ago I attended an event in Ottawa on Canada - US Trade Law. I actually went to ask questions about Trade Law in the context of technology Software as a Service (SaaS) and the application service provider (ASP) model. I wrote about it in my blog, here http://elliotross.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/export-control-laws-critical-issues-for-canadian-technology-companies/and it consistently gets hit by search engines.
It seems that there are no Canadian Lawyers or Legal firms that choose to raise their brand identity by blogging. They should be getting these search hits - not me!
Its gratifying to learn that someone has actually found my blog in cyberspace or the blogosphere. Elliot, we lawyers and CEOs are not the earliest adopters.
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