Tagging: Into the Mind of the CEO

Blogging is often offered up as a tactic CEOs should employ to humanize the seemingly too distant CEO or as a way to communicate regularly and effectively to internal audiences.

But blogging is hard - and besides, really getting inside your own head to communicate “who you are” is impossible for anyone. After all, when we sit down to write a blog post, it’s almost always reactionary - we write what is immediate, burning at the moment, on our radar right then, or what we believe the troops need to hear about a specific issue.  It is rarely with the discipline to communicate consistent visioning or mentoring or even the passion we have for what we do everyday.   And, even if you were that disciplined, it would take a long time of reading your blog for a clear window to develop into what drives you and your decisions or your leadership.   

Enter tagging.  CEOs should be tagging. It is the most powerful way to communicate what makes you tick or what is important to you as a CEO.

It provides insight into why you make the decisions you do and what flavors your leadership.  Tagging adds up all those vital little “bits” that make up your personal “CEO-ness” - like a mind scan but without all the high-tech equipment.  It is something no other medium can do quite as effectively - or as simply.

Tagging can help CEOs meet the eternal challenges of leading.  What if you tagged things like:

• Books you are reading
• Book that have inspired you
• Articles that you find yourself wishing everyone would read
• Web sites that worry you
• Web sites that inform you
• Web sites that “get it”
• Competitors whom you have your eye on
• News pieces that point to current or emerging market pressures
• Articles that mention your company
• Interviews you do
• Industry reports that you think will impact your products or services
• Blog posts that say something you wish you had in a way you wish you could
• Your RSS feeds or email subscriptions
• Jokes that are funny because they seem to comment on something as you see it in your organization
• Case studies that you wish were yours
• Things that illustrate industry or consumer trends you think the company should pay attention to

Now, by simply being able to scan through your tags, you are giving everyone in your organization a window into not just who you are, but the things that drive you, your decisions and your vision.  How much more impactful is this than your once a year or quarterly address; or your blog posts that are, by their nature, excruciatingly narrow? 

Tagging gives your entire organization an evocative view of both you and the challenges you see that face their industry, their company and their jobs.   It is a bird’s eye view they can get no other way.  It’s even better than winning a “day with the CEO” because it evolves over time - just like you and your challenges and your organization.

Here's how to get your own CEO tag cloud started:

1)  Choose a social bookmarking site that allows private tags and register for an account (most are free).  I like Blogmarks.net, but del.icio.us and Blinklist.com are also great choices.  (You can also do this with public tags, if you don't mind the entire world seeing them.)

2)  Take a second to drag the bookmarklet provided by your bookingmarking site to your browser toolbar - it makes for one fast click while you are viewing something you want to tag.  You’ll find the bookmarklet in your account settings/tools of your chosen bookmark service.

3)  When browsing something you want to tag, click your bookmarklet in your toolbar and simply type in your tag words in the appropriate place in the bookmarking form (they usually pop up in a small separate window).  Use any words or concepts as a tag.  Words that make sense to you or your organizational culture - it might be “competitors,” “must-read,” “trends,” - you get to choose.  Use several tags, as content you bookmark often fits into more than one “category.”

4)  Give everyone in your organization access to this “private” account and url so they can view your tags. 

5)  Encourage everyone to subscribe via RSS - or by email - to your entire tag list; or just to the tag they might specifically want to watch.   Feedblitz is a nice service that turns any RSS feed into an email for those not yet using RSS on a regular basis.

If you are brave, you can even suggest employees tag items with your name that they think you should see.  Check in on that tag periodically, or better yet, subscribe to your name tag via RSS to keep the information flowing both ways.

You just might find tagging gives you an evocative view of yourself.

Comments

[Mr. Make]

Nice study - interesting idea - the tagging to visualize data has been used for a long time, just called differently and not been comuterized - but this is a totally neat way of doing it!

[Kane]

A nice study. Oh may I call it a study?

[Christophe Ducamp]

Hé bonjour Linda, nice post I did not see before. Could be useful as I start next week a new "networking attitude and wiki" training for CEOs. I think this post will help to explain the usefulness of tags in wikis too.
I've taken the "permission" to mention you and the original link before translating this post in french on one of my "ghost town blog" (cf URL above). Hope you don't mind. Let me know if you see any issue.
Have a nice week-end Linda.