If you’re currently engaged in a debate about whether blogging could help the public profile of your organisation – and you’re encountering the “if it was any use then big firms would be doing it” line of resistance – you might be interested in pointing out a new blog that’s just come online.
It’s a small company that you might have heard of in passing – General Motors.
Yes, the General Motors. And it’s not some anonymous drone in the marketing department that’s blogging – it’s the Vice Chairman of Product Development and Chairman of GM North America, Bob Lutz. I always find the US style of executive job titles a bit confusing, but I think we can safely assume that he has the key to the executive washroom.
Reading the posts so far, it does appear to be a genuine blog by a real person – it’s certainly not written in the corporate house style that you’d expect from a PR agency. It’ll be very interesting on three counts. Firstly to see if he can keep it up, and secondly whether he can manage to be interesting without revealing too much that would be of interest to his competitors – you have to assume that the inside of his head would be an interesting place to be if you’re a rival. And lastly, it’ll be fascinating to see if this starts a trend, either within the motor industry or more widely. 2005 could be the year of the CEO blogger.
