Jeremiah has a post about the Supernova conference he recently attended. In this he talks about a question that was asked of Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun.

"should CEOs blog?"

The notes on his answer are

"John, refers to CEOs 5 years ago not getting email, the job of every leader is to communicate the vision of the company, to all audiences. Blogs are very efficient mechanisims to communicate. CEOs make fewer and fewer decisions every year, the developers are making decisions, and they don't use NYTimes or WSJ. They're using digg"

I'd heard all the comparisons of RSS being the plumbing just like SMTP is to email, and that it's what we do with RSS that will make the difference, rather than RSS itself but never really thought about how email and blogs compare. 

One of the first companies I worked for had multiple offices and specialised in emerging markets, so all of the offices were in places with poor communications.  Convincing the CEO that we should be using email was easy as it would improve our communications and reduce our phone costs which were very high.

What is the killer feature of blogging for CEO's?  How do we prove to them that it adds to sales or reduces costs?  Most of the CEO's I've come into contact with are busy and if you're asking them to add more to that workload there needs to be some payback for them.

Is it that they can talk directly with customers and therefore create more customer advocates, which in turn will drive sales and reduce the need for advertising as your customers will do it for you.

Or should the CEO blog at all, do they have time for this?  If the developers are the ones making the decisions they should be the ones blogging and the CEO should be the one focused on the NYTimes or WSJ.