Much has now been written and said about Mr. Mackey's use of a sock puppet to post on Yahoo about the company he runs, Whole Foods.
Now that I've given it some more thought, let me unequivocally say that what Mr. Mackey did was just plain stupid. There's really no justification for a CEO of a publicly traded company to use anonymity when making public comments about his company or his industry. It's that simple.
I don't care what Mr. Mackey says in his own defense ("I had fun doing it" and "I never intended any of those postings to be identified with me" -- go here for the complete set of excuses) -- it simply demonstrates that he is divorced from reality. I think his Board and perhaps the SEC should sanction him for his actions.
On to the lesson: today's Journal has a follow-up story on the trend of CEO blogging, quoting my pal and CEO blogging expert Debbie Weil. It probes the subject of how and why CEOs blog and how they can avoid putting their foot in their mouth when writing quickly and with light editing. It got me thinking about how this relates to media training and message consistency.
The lesson is that corporate communicators who have been media trained, that is, trained on what they can and cannot say in public to benefit their company, will naturally be the best at blogging. Blogging, after all, is very much like being interviewed, only there's no interviewer. On the flip side, corporate communicators who don't know what to say or not say, and haven't been oriented to how to use public communication channels, will make mistakes over and over, whether they are blogging or giving interviews to reporters.
The WSJ used Debbie Weil as a source, huh? She did write the book -- or at least a book -- but did the reporter know about this?
ReplyDeleteWell that is Shel's opinion. Debbie does an excellent job and I have no problem with her leveraging her resources for the benefit of a client, particularly since she was totally transparent about it. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...
ReplyDeleteI don't intend to cast stones, nor even to say, "Shel said X, so the WSJ should have done Y..." I simply pointed to that article as it provides a decent summary of the events -- as well as Shel's opinion about -- the recent "thing" going on in Debbie's world.
ReplyDeleteSo in that light: I simply find it interesting/odd/coincidental/strange/whatever that the WSJ used Debbie for a resource in an article about CEO blogging right in the middle of this little dust-up about some of her own blogging-related endeavors. That's all.
(And now that I'm a couple of days removed from first reading about Debbie's "thing," I don't feel particularly strongly one way or the other about it. Funny how a little time will do that.)