Alan Weiss made a special appearance at Friday's IMC-AZ meeting and gave a great talk to those of us in attendance. I really enjoyed Alan Weiss’s presentation – except for his comments about blogging, which were "Blogs are worthless" and "Nobody reads them". It’s not the first time I’ve heard those words and they always come from someone who is not a blogger, has never blogged, and does not understand blogging’s potential. I have never heard anyone say, “I’ve been blogging regularly for two years and it’s a complete waste of time.”
Alan spoke of gaining an early reputation as a contrarian and while it occurred to me that perhaps he is doing just that, but from the tone of his voice when he said, “Blogs are worthless” and “Nobody reads them” I think he was being sincere. I guess this means that I’m going to have to assume the mantle of contrarian on this issue.
First, as for Alan’s “Nobody reads them” comment: Not only do CEOs and senior executives read blogs, many are blogging themselves. TheNewPR maintains a list of them. Alan mentioned Marriott and Hewlett Packard as some of his clients. He undoubtedly would be surprised to discover that J Willard Marriott Jr, CEO of Marriott International has a blog. So does Eric Kintz, VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence for Hewlett-Packard.
In fact TheNewPR’s list contains 272 names of people in leadership positions of various organizations who blog. Some of them are:
- Rudi Fischer, CEO, Telekom Austria
- Sab Kanaujia, VP, NBC Digital Media Group
- Richard Charkin, Chief Executive, Macmillan Publishers Ltd
- Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing, Guardian Newspapers
- Scott Anderson, Director of shared content, Tribune Publishing and Interactive
- Marc Babej, President, Reason Inc.
- Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
- Carole Brown, Chair, Chicago Transit Board
- Colin Crawford, VP/Online, International Data Group
- Michael M. Crow, Arizona State University President
- Marc Cuban, HDNET & Dallas Mavericks
- Chad Dickerson, CTO, InfoWorld
- John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer, Novell
- Michael Dunn, VP, Hearst Interactive Media
- Jeff Jaffe, CTO, Novell
- Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman, General Motors Corporation
- Lisa Meyers Brown, VP for Marketing, American Cancer Society’s Eastern Division
- Justin Rattner, CTO, Intel
- Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, Sun Microsystems
- Bob Parsons, President, godaddy.com
- Michael Powell, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
- Michael Pusateri, VP of Engineering, Disney ABC Cable Networks Group
- Joe Wikert, Vice President and Publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Professional/Trade division
- Steve Wilson, Senior Director of Global Web Communications, McDonald’s
- Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems
Someday soon, Alan Weiss will be meeting with a large potential client. The decision-maker will hand Alan one of Hugh MacLeod’s Streetcards. Alan will stare at it blankly and flip it over and over in two hands as a question forms on his face. At that moment Alan will lose the client and not even know it.
Or perhaps between now and then he will ‘get it’ and – as he so often said Friday – he will marvel at how stupid he was just two weeks ago.
Recent Comments