Comments on: Do Executives Really Read Blogs?

By: Jeff Hardison

Jeff Hardison — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:47:11 +0000

Great post. I work with a mid-sized EDA company that’s fully embraced social media. They make hundreds of training videos for YouTube, quickly address queries about their product on Twitter, keep in touch with customers on Facebook and so on. What helps them is the top executives in the company are completely on board with social media.

I’ve found that if management isn’t bought in with social media — and all the perceived IP risk, negative feedback online, need for a human voice, etc. — a vendor has a real hard time of being successful there.

Please keep talking about this issue. I think the resulting conversation here and elsewhere helps us overcome the hesitancy and get more people to jump in. Thank you.

By: Gary Dare

Gary Dare — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:28:48 +0000

I would hazard to guess that the low presence of higher level executives on sites like Facebook, etc. versus a ‘professional’ site like Linked-In can be explained by a) time (as Mike and Sean write, they may get snippets in daily briefings as part of their info digest, folks lower in the totem pole gather that information in the course of their own research) and b) liability. People may send them questions that they cannot answer, or there is a risk that one would say something that discloses sensitive information or accidentally commit their organization (e.g., “… we are the cutting edge in FTL development …” (-;).

By: Daniel Nenni

Daniel Nenni — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:27:09 +0000

Hi Harry,

I just posted on Professional Social Media:

http://danielnenni.com/2009/06/25/professional-social-media-i-get-it/

I can tell you for a fact that EDA, IP, and Semiconductor executives spend time on LinkedIn, as my blog is linked to it and I can see where the views come from.

D.A.N.

By: Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:05:36 +0000

I would start with how many executives read e-mail and browse websites before I would worry about them reading blogs. They may pay folks to read blogs and provide them with a verbal briefing, perhaps accompanied by a power point slide or two.

I don’t write for executives–at least I don’t put startup founders in the same category as executives–so I haven’t given it much thought. I worry about having serious conversations with early adopters, and they definitely read blogs.

Whether that translates into executive readership I leave to the social media experts, as a social media novice I am still learning. And I think we are at the 1% point at best on what the landscape will look like in ten to fifteen years. Could you have inferred the dotcom boom from SLAC putting up a website? I think it’s very difficult to predict what it will look like in five years.

By: Mike Demler

Mike Demler — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:11:16 +0000

Interesting studies, but not surprising. If you meant EDA when you said “we are in a high-tech industry with technology savvy execs, who tend to be younger than the average”, I would beg to differ. EDA executives are mostly (apparently according to Forbes) Generation-Wang. I doubt that very many EDA execs actually read blogs, but they might get snippets in their daily news briefings.

-Mike