Monday, April 30, 2007

Diva Marketing Blog Post

i was reading a post from the Diva Marketing Blog today that announced that a few consumer brands were making the leap into the blogosphere finally. The two that were mentioned were the Marriot hotel and the Carnival Cruise brands. I think given the trend towards the web and technology these days, this is a very effective strategy. Especially in a service oriented company like the ones mentioned, it allows the CEOs to get feedback directly from the consumers and for the consumers to hear about anything new directly from the top. Getting information from the CEO himself creates a sense of accountability and instills confidence in the consumer because it looks like the company places a greater emphasis on service, which is ever so important in this day and age.

4 comments:

Toby said...

Mike - thanks for the shout out and continuing the conversation. Tonight I had a conversation with several bloggers who thought it was okay for a CEO to use a ghost writer if he/she "tweaked" the content to ensure it was in the CEOs voice.

Wondered what your thoughts might be on this one.

Veronika said...

Hi everyone,
I think that CEOs blogging about their company is a great idea to show that they are close to their customers and that they want to understand exactly what the customer wants and to show they want to hear it from the customer first hand. However I think that having a ghost writer totally defeats the purpose of the whole CEO blog in the first place because then its not him having the conversation, and I think that if the customers found that out they would feel very betrayed and it could potentially do more harm for the company's reputation than the blog did good in the first place.

Michael Meschisen said...

Toby - I kind of agree with Veronika to a point that if customers find out that CEOs arent really writing the blogs then it could negatively affect the business. On the other hand, i know CEOs, especially of the larger companies, dont have a whole lot of extra time to maintain a blog all by themselves so having someone else write some content and as long as the CEO reviews it and approves of it then it might be okay. maybe a way to have the CEO put his seal of approval or something like that on the post would ensure its authenticity.

Veronika said...

I still think that the point of having a CEO blog about the company is to have the information come straight from him to the customers. And I do understand that CEOs are busy people but if they do not have time to blog than that is something they don't have to do. I feel like the CEOs that do end up blogging themselves with out a ghost writer are the ones that actually enjoy the blogging and enjoy talking to the public. Also I think if your complany's culture doesn't really go with the blogging culture it won't work anyways and people will see it as a marketing scheeme, which it is with ghostwriters.