I have a penchant for corporate blog rankings (Top 10 Corporate Blogs, Top 10 CEO Blogs) and in the spirit of extending my trivia pursuit to Corporate Marketing Blogs, I decided to investigate the state of CMO Blog...
...(meaning blogs of C-level Chief Marketing Officers at corporations, Ad/PR agencies). The result was underwhelming to say the least.
As is normal, with all my rankings I used the newPRWiki for my source and guess what? Out of a total of 248 corporate blogs listed, there were only 12 CMO blogs from across 5 countries. Without further ado, here are the Top 10 CMO blogs on the planet (ranked by their Technorati standing):
# 10: Randy Littleson -- VP, Marketing, Kinaxis
# 9: Stefan Coucheir -- Managing Director, Antenno
# 8: Steve Wilson -- Sr. Director of Global Communications, McDonalds
# 7: Marcel Reichart -- Managing Director Marketing & Communications, Hubert Burda Media
# 6: Michael Dunn -- VP, Hearst Interactive Media
# 5: Frank Gens -- Senior VP of Research, IDC
# 4: Michael O'Connor Clarke -- VP of Business Development, Marqui, Inc.
# 3: Eric Kintz -- VP of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence, Hewlett-Packard Company
# 2: Randy Baseler -- VP of Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
# 1: Steve Rubel -- Senior VP, Edelman PR
–– ...
Source: The New PR Wiki (conceptualized by Neville Hobson). Corporate blog listings on the wiki are currently maintained by Constantin Basturea. Thanks to Neville and Constantin for creating and maintaining an invaluable resource for the blogosphere.
I also read a recent article in the New York Times (NYT), by Randall Stross, where he questions C-level Executives' apparent hesitancy to blog. The NYT piece makes a case-study of Jonathan Schwartz (CEO, Sun Microsystems) and his apparent ability to walk-the-talk or should I say blog-the-talk.
CEO. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz's example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive's work week. In an exhortatory piece, "If You Want to Lead, Blog," published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that "having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today."
If that's the case for CEOs, I think it's equally imperative for CMOs/VPs of Marketing to blog, since they are expected to be the voice of the company.
Is Seth Godin right, when he talks about the Myth of the CMO, or are marketers still testing the waters? As fellow marketers, what are your thoughts on CMO blogging?
Technorati tags: blogging CMO marketing PR Seth Godin Neville Hobson New PR Wiki