Canadian CEOs aren't embracing blogging as
idiotically as their American counterparts

The world of Canadian business had some good news last week, and it had some bad news.

The bad news, as reported by ProgressiveGrocer.com: "Wal-Mart named Canada's best retail employer."

The good news, according to Canada's National Post(and brought to our attention by Shel Holtz): "Lists of chief executive bloggers ... show there
are many more in the United States than in Canada."

As sad as that piece of Wal-Mart news is謡e try and fail to imagine the scene in the back room at Canada's worst retail employer葉he notion that any sizeable number of CEOs are going to write and sustain interesting, candid, interactive blogs is even sadder.

CEOs are too busy to exchange an e-mail with their speechwriter, let alone compose their own blogs. CEOs are too nervous and careful to say anything truly interesting in their blogs. Hell, many CEOs are too out of touch with customers who make less than seven figures to say anything that makes sense to ANYBODY.

GM has started a CEO blog. I read the first one, last week or the week before; I can't remember what it said, only that it read like something some hip speechwriter weedled out of him.

Edelman PR's Dick Edelman does a CEO blog; last week, he commented on the Ketchum/Williams/No Child Left Behind disgrace; his courageous take was that the thing gave PR a bad name but that he knows Dave Drobis, the CEO of Ketchum, and he's just sure Dave wouldn't knowingly condone thing like that.

(To his credit, Edelman later expressed his disappointment with Ketchum's lame public response to this crisis. At least we think he's disappointed in Ketchum; he didn't name Ketchum, saying only he was disappointed in "several key members of the PR establishment.")

David Kistle, the chairman of the International Association of Business
Communicators, launched his cool blog in October. He's done seven boring entries in three-and-a-half months, and the only interest he's generated in the blogosphere or out has been from tech-savvy (and sometimes tech-obsessed) IABCers bellyaching in their blogs about Kistle's lame blog.

In the National Post article, some hipster goof named Robin Hopper is quoted as saying that blogs put a human face on the corporation. Hopper is the blog-happy CEO of a great Canadian corporation that you've surely heard of.

The Royal Bank of Canada? No. Suncor? No. Wal-Mart Canada? No.

Actually, it's that august institution known to all the world as iUpload.

Show me five CEOs of companies that don't have a capital letter in the middle of their name or technology in their portfolio, doing a truly interesting blog for more than a month, and I'll eat my hat.

Meanwhile, I預 professional writer with very little to do all day but try to entertain a bunch of fellow writers who don't get out much either謡ill trudge forward on my lonely struggle to do an interesting blog myself.