CEO blogs used to be all the rage within the business blogging community. Remember when we’d hear blog consultants gush about CEOs who dared to blog with transparency and authenticity. I rarely hear much talk about CEO bloggers anymore. Do you?

Remember Jonathan Schwartz? He was the poster child of blogging CEOs, the now former (as of February 3rd) CEO of Sun Microsystems. All you could hear was crickets on Jonathan’s blog from May of last year until finally Jonathan’s farewell post on January 27. Clearly he had a few things going on; Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun. When you’re selling your company that is pretty much all that occupies your mind. I know that first-hand, as I’m happy to say my company (Netconcepts) was acquired by Covario last month.

The thing that most struck me was the name of Jonathan’s new blog. It’s titled “What I Couldn’t Say”. Hmmm. I guess transparency within a corporation only goes so far.

With the economy is in freefall, perhaps the tolerance of various boards of directors for CEO transparency has lessened? Or it could be simply that CEOs are just too busy and blogging isn’t such a priority, now that “blog” isn’t Word of the Year anymore.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is another CEO blogger who was acquired and who we don’t hear from any longer in the blogosphere. His last post was July of last year, and that wasn’t so much of a blog post as it was a copy of a letter that was sent to all the Zappos employees announcing the acquisition by Amazon. Before that, Tony last posted in January 2009.

I’m guilty too. My own “CEO blog” hasn’t seen any activity in over a month — no posts since Covario acquired us. But the reason for my ‘radio silence’ has nothing to do with the acquirer. I may no longer be a President/CEO, but I am still encouraged to keep blogging. The reason I don’t blog frequently is the same one as last year (when I was only posting a few times a month at best): I’m preoccupied running around speaking at conferences all over the U.S., writing for magazines, etc.

Then there are the corporate blogs where the CEO occasionally chimes in with his/her own post. My acquirer, Covario, fits into that group with its “Actionable Insights” blog. Trinity Road, an etailer of religious products like first communion dresses and rosaries, has a corporate blog, but you rarely if ever hear from the CEO on it.

Then there are the CEO blogs where you wonder if it’s actually the CEO who’s blogging because it’s so polished. Steve Spangler the science toys e-tailer, I think fits into that category. If you look at the posts on Steve’s blog you’ll see a gradual evolution to a style that is more and more polished.

Chris Baggott, CEO of the Compendium Blogware, has one of the best CEO blogs out there, in my opinion. It’s full of valuable content, it’s not overly polished, his personality really shines through, and he blogs regularly. It figures though. If any CEO would have that kind of a CEO blog, it would be the CEO of a business blogging software company!

I had an enjoyable dinner last night at the trendy NY restaurant Spice Market with

David Geller and Brian Ratzliff, respectively CEO/President and VP of Marketing & Business Development of WhatCounts, along with Bob Silver, SVP of MWWGroup PR. They wanted to pitch me on the value of an all-in-one blog hardware/software platform for corporate blogging, the BlogUnit, following my somewhat cynical post about it following its launch announcement.

Since they were nice enough to ply me with food and wine, I’ll be nice enough to take a few minutes to summarize some of what we discussed and share my reflections.

WhatCounts has been around for about three years, focused on email
marketing services for mid-sized companies (some of their ~150 clients
include Seattle Times, Chicago Sun, Advance Publishing). Hoping
to catch the blog wave, they’ve come out with the Unit, blog publishing
software bundled with a server box. Notable features include built-in
email newsletter publishing integration (a big plus in my mind
and gaping hole in most blog publishing platforms), APIs, Web Services,
LDAP support, other cool tech acronyms, built-in ticket support a la
TypePad, high-end customer support, in-bound RSS feed publishing
(another gaping hole in many blog publishing platforms; everyone is so
hot on publishing to RSS, but what about taking RSS feeds from other sites or applications and publishing them through the blog publishing tool to your own blog?), and other stuff.

Price: $10,000+.

That last piont is one we got stuck on for a while. Their argument
is that for corporations of a decent size, that price is no obstable,
considering that it includes the hardware the company would need to
dedicate to the system anyway, along with professional support,
built-in security, yadda-yadda. My feeling was they will have a hell of
a time competiting at that price given the legions of bloggers who will
be advocating Movable Type, WordPress, etc. at a cost of between free
and practically free.

It’s not the price itself I think they have to worry about but the
evangelists. So a company, or rather an individual employee,  gets the
idea the company should have a "blog." They’re going to start their
research and immediately hear "Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad,
WordPress, Movable Type, Manilla, Drupal, TypePad, Movable Type,
WordPress," etc. Who the hell is going to evangelize a $10,000 product?
That’s what commissioned sales people are for.

Besides, the more I thought about it after I left, I don’t believe
you’re really talking about a "blog" when you’re talking $10,000
software. You’re talking about an enterprise business knowledge
management system. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, "content
management." And everyone who knows blogs knows that they are the
antidote to content management.

An anecdote may be instructive here. A "friend of mine" recently
started a job at a mid-sized company and decided an internal blog would
be a great knowlege management tool. So I…I mean, my friend, started
mumbling about it internally and he got the idea that several people
would want to consider this or that aspect of whether a blog was the
best tool or what various approvals may be needed, etc.

Instead of losing heart, he sniffed around and found a group that
had already flirted with the idea, got a referral to a friendly guy in
IT who went ahead and found server space and installed MT. My friend
tweaked the basic template a bit and filled the site with a week’s
worth of content or so before he even pointed it out to his manager:
"This is what I’m talking about." At that point, the manager could see
exactly how useful it was.

My friend started quietly sharing links to content on the blog to
others internally on a beta basis, many of whom agreed it could be a
useful way to distribute information. Eventually, he was introduced to
the group internally that is tasked with managing the intranet. They
let it be known that his style of skunkworks wasn’t the way he was
supposed to have gone about this (hey, I’m new here), but after some
quick evaluation they also agreed it was a handy tool, one that seemed
easy to support, the price was truly a non-issue, etc. It’s now on the
road to offical sanction and dedicated internal resources.

My friend was told later that had he gone about it through the
official channels it certainly would have taken much longer to ever get
the green light.

Point is, pricing the tool at $10,000 means it has to go
through the proper channels. My friend’s own department (market
research) doesn’t have $10,000 for software applications (but he could
put the $150 MT license fee on his corporate Amex no problem), and
whether IT would have seen fit to cough up that much dough vs. kludging
something themselves would have been a decision that could have ended
nowhere. That kind of gate is going to test the enthusiasm of many
internal blog evangelists. The reason blogs have spread like wildfire
is they are being promoted by evangelists, not sales people.

My $0.02. I told them I’m sure there’s a market for their sales
approach. But I think there’s a much bigger market for Six Apart’s.
There are, after all, only 2000 "Global 2000" companies, compared to
11+ million small businesses in the U.S. alone.

I’m slamming on deadline on the moment, and this long-ish article is actually a bit too dense for me to give it the credit it deserves, so I’ll just call it to your attention. A “Big Think” kind of piece for the CTO at large enterprises to chew on.

My favorite quote, from Ross Mayfield:

“Social media builds relationships. Connection happens before conversation, but still, this is business. What you will not find on your balance sheet is an underlying value proposition of enhancing social capital.”

I admit, I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about, but I’ve spoken with him on the phone about this kind of stuff a few times, and he’s really, really smart and very compelling in context. Maybe I’m just too tired now….

Thanks once again to Olivier for the tip. (You guys don’t realize it, but Olivier sends me about half of what I blog here; it’s just too tedious to credit him every time. I’ve invited him to blog to the site directly himself, but he says he’s too busy. Yeah, you and me both, buddy!)

UPDATE:
Ross has more interesting commentary about this on his blog now.

Internet News: IT Heavies Lifting Dollars For Blogs

I hadn’t really intended to track the whole trend of using blogs for intranets / knowledge management here in this directory, as my specialty is more customer-facing marketing, but what the heck. It’s obviously a great use of blogs, which a lot of companies are pursuing.

Along those lines, this piece provides a great case study as to how InfoWorld themselves are using blogs internally. Picking up halfway through the article, Chad Dickerson, CTO of InfoWorld, writes:

[M]y team has been using the blog-driven IT roadmap in weekly staff meetings as a platform to discuss the initiatives we have completed and to look ahead to new ones. Our meetings no longer have agendas or redundant handouts, because we don’t need them. Of course, some items have dropped off our master plan altogether, and new ones have been added, but the important point is that our master plan is always updated and readily available on our intranet, and any changes are distributed via RSS to anyone who wants to see them.

InfoWorld: Blogging Behind the Firewall