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In his words:

“The executive wants to launch a blog and he’s excited about it, but a Corporate Communications staffer is a bit hesitant because she’s not sure what the story would be on a weekly basis.”

Ah, the dreaded, “we have a smart executive that can actually talk about our business but I’m not sure if he actually will” fear.

In my experience, it really comes down to institutionalizing that commitment as you move toward high profile corporate and leadership blogging. I’ve listed some things to think as you consider your own corporate blogging initiative.

-Discuss the topics to be discussed and decide the amount of depth to be explored.

- Create and publish an editorial calendar. This creates some transparency internally and will put the right pressure on the executive to get it done.

- Pull in the Corporate Communications and Legal group early to set some guidelines and discuss best practices.

- Perform a content audit that covers not only existing content that should be surfaced, but external content (RSS feeds,blogs,industry sites) that needs to be distilled down by the executive.

- Perform a broad-based analysis of other peers blogging in the executive’s circle. ( Telligent recommends using a social media monitoring tool to provide ongoing insight and conversation monitoring)

- Decide who else will be involved in the executive’s workflow. In other words, make sure there’s a community manager to perform day-to-day activities like moderation, posting, etc.

- From a technology perspective, make sure you have a sustainable plan for extending the blog’s reach. Too many times, the technology has limitations that hinder the ability to wrap other community elements around the executive’s blog.

- Have the executive and the blogging team talk to customers. Think of this as a blog-oriented focus group. Many times the company’s customers will have specific business issues and challenges they’d like to see a real executive address in a public forum.

- When all else fails, start the blogging initiative behind the firewall and help your executive get comfortable with the process. If it crashes and burns, you’ve only got internal egg on the executive’s face.

And while I was compiling the content, I started by performing some quick Google searches and then moved on to more specific tag-based searches for things like “executive blogs” and “corporate” blogs”. Those two tasks uncovered the links below:

Baseline Magazine article on executive blogs:

Delicious search for “Executive Blogs”.

5 corporate blogs that built buzz (Dell is a Telligent client)

I hope you’ll provide some feedback as you flesh out the pieces of your own social media strategy.

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I’m also presenting tomorrow on "Choosing A White Label Social Network", and will be blogging some of that content here later today.  The CoverItLive Widget below will have my updates over the next few days, so send me some comments or let me know if you have any questions. Hope to meet some of you in Chicago.

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Here’s the Flickr set.

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It was a hectic June and I’m finally starting to distill some of my conversations and briefings. I was in Boston a few weeks back for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and while I definitely came back energized, the best part was the old-fashioned version of social networking — pressing the flesh as the saying goes.

I was there as media and while I would’ve liked to have blogged more about the show, I did manage to get some microblogging in courtesy of CoverItLive’s service. I realized early that I’d be attending a bunch of sessions with a crappy Wi-Fi connection in the backdrop, so I figured I’d cut my losses and get as much micro content in place as possible.

The widget below is the snapshot of my ad hoc meetings, session tracks, and a few hallway and bar conversations. Some of the latter were definitely the more interesting as I had several instances where I connected with folks I’d blogged with and collaborated with through Twitter and other channels.

I ran the CoveritLive widget on the Content Management Connection and ECM Blog after the show and noticed it had about 500 unique views over the course of a few days. How much of that had to do with the novelty of the service remains to be seen. Janet Lee Johnson thought it was cool enough to blog about it, and I noticed it had enough lift to light up Twitter with a few Tweets.

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Before you get too Wordle-y on us,go here and make sure you have the latest JAVA software update.

My del.icio.us Wordle:

 My Marketing Blog Wordle:

Fun stuff.

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