Live Communication is Everyone's Job

The Live Web is tempting. It offers a space to create real and powerful content relationships, develop innovative and creative campaigns and fundraising initiatives and involve clients and stakeholders in the work of communication and marketing.

For the braver organisation it’s a chance to get the whole organisation involved in communicating from the campaigner, through the fundraiser to the intern and the frontline delivery team. They can all get involved, telling their stories and thus build the organisation’s “story”.

But there is more. The CEO can take her place as part of that new open source marketing and communications team. She can tell her story as well as enable and encourage her staff to tell theirs.

A CEO in the age of open source campaigning and communications is one among many. She may be a leader but in a new way. She doesn’t dictate strategy or messages; She enables them to be built from the bottom up. She harnesses the power of the crowd to build a powerful network of campaigners, fundraisers and active members creating and delivering on ideas and initiatives. Her job is to put in place real structures and systems that enable people inside and outside the organisation to share expertise, passion and information and find new markets and opportunities. But she can play a real part in that sharing of information and passion, the raw material of effective campaigns, fundraising and content relationships. She just has to use her voice.

But here is the problem. The Live Web respects voice not job title. It understands passion and humanity, not status. In order to join in that conversation and let it benefit from her knowledge, experience, expertise and commitment, a CEO has to talk like a real person who cares. She has to be 3D, real and human.

A CEO can try and write like her PR company (she may even get her PR company to ghost-write it… and then suffer the wrath of the blogsopshere). Or she can write like a real woman. Edouard Leclerc, the founder of the French supermarket chain, blogs like he’s bothered. He talks about politics, his feelings and ideas as well as the way he runs his company. In the non-profit sector, F. Nicholas Jacobs CEO of a medical research charity tells stories about his life including how having to ‘duck and cover’ as a child made him into a worrier and effected the way he now works. Nick's Blog - Windber Research Institute Here we are meeting a real man with a past and a present. Here is someone who I can have a relationship with, and by implication an organisation with a human face.

CEO blogs offer a way of showing how an organisation runs and is run. They also offer a way of humanising that organisation and that management. Above all they give an opportunity to put passion at the head and the heart of the organisation’s business. It’s not easy. It demands confidence and courage but it has the potential to show to those inside, outside and potentially those on board with the organisation, that it has passion, personality and purpose at the heart of its work.

A VISION for CEO blogging

V: V is for 'voice'. Think human. People are meeting you, virtually - so meet them. Talk to them man to (wo)man. They are not a demographic or an audience or even a potential supporter, they are a person with their own ideas, passions and interests. Talk honestly and openly as you would in conversation. You are a person talking to another person. Listen to what they're saying and asking. Don't try and give the corporate line.

I: I is for 'i with a small I'. Think modest. You are not the organisation. You are not even its spokesperson. You are just one person. That is your strength. Be modest but not false. You do not have all the answers so welcome the chance to say 'I don't know' or even ‘I/we got it wrong’/

S: S is for 'simple'. Think small. Keep it simple. This is a conversation not a lecture. You can't cover everything or every nuance. All you can do within this format - indeed in many Live Web spaces - is paint simple pictures. But just because you are keeping it simple doesn't mean you should see yourself as 'delivering messages'. You're not, you're talking to people and painting pictures for them.
 
I: I is for 'improvise'. Think jazz. The art of improvisation is setting the tempo and the chord sequence and then jamming and seeing where it goes. It is structured underneath but lively and real on top. Don't worry about it, just jam. Let your passion and your enthusiasm show through. Trust yourself to tell the stories the way you do in the real world, down the pub. Don't over plan.

O: O is for 'open source'. Think team. This is not an interview. It is not your space or platform. It's you and your readers’ space. You are building it together. Their parts are as important as yours. At the end it's the conversation that people will read and remember. Their questions and comments are interesting and relevant.

N: N is for 'narrative'. Think stories. People like stories. They remember them and pass them on. Your work life (and the rest of your life) is full of stories. You tell them when you're with your friends and family, so tell them here to these new friends. They’ll set up lots of new relationships. The stories don't have to big or clever or even funny. They can be small and personal as long as they're real.