Seems like NESTA is still involved in very interesting projects, and one of the latest “Social by Social” seems likewise interesting. It’s a practical guide on how to utilize social media in your organization. The book can be bought at their site, but also read for free as a PDF. The publication itself is Creative Commons licensed, why doesn’t danish government agencies also publish using CC?

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Today I first read about The Flip, a smart and small video camcorder for those small videos. The camera is both simple to operate, but also simple to connect to your computer and sharing the video on e.g. YouTube afterwards.

What is most astonishing about this camera: You can get about 20 Flips, for the price of one SR12!

Imagine buying 50 Flips for your company, giving them out to employees or customers and asking them to do themed videos on what your company does for customer care, work happiness, or whatever story you want to get out there. The price is so low now, that everyone should try this out!

Back to the title. I am wondering a lot these days why you don’t see more CEOs or political leaders blogging, the standard answer from most of them seems to be that they are too busy. As I said above, I think it’s about routines and prioritization. Especially for political leaders, the blog should be equally important as tv interviews or photoshoots for magazines.

I was pretty annoyed to read in Weekendavisen (scroll to page 3) this weekend, that Naser Khader (leader of new danish party New Alliance) spent a few hours on a photoshoot for some small magazine, this is while he still haven’t blogged a single word! This guy talks and talks about revolutionizing the danish tax system, our foreign policy and a lot more, but haven’t really opened up a dialogue on the subject yet. One might begin to believe that Naser is afraid of criticism. His NA-colleague Lars Kolind is not though, we just helped him relaunch his blog this morning. Will be interesting to follow.

I have now asked a few CEOs why they don’t blog and some actually gave some chocking answers. One told me that he was afraid to run out of material, that after blogging for – say – 14 days, he wouldn’t know what to write. Erh, that really struck me. One can be the leader of 5000 people and not have anything, even remotely, interesting to say? Then I think the problem is a lot bigger than not blogging.

Seriously, CEOs and political leaders of Europe, do you have nothing to say? Or is it really because you are all afraid to open up the decision-making process just one tiny bit?

(PS: I thought we lived in a world where leadership and facilitation reign, not a Henry-Ford-illusionary world where control and closed silos are in place.)

“The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.”

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But one thing that really struck some danish bloggers was the fact that we had made a rather harsh blog policy, basically just telling people to act nice and not offend anyone or any law. This was done with a specific swedish case in mind. On top of the policy the blog gartners (or moderators, if you like) approve all comments before they are sent online.

The latter part was probably the hardest for the danish blogosphere to accept, but it seems now that especially Nyhedsavisen can understand why we choose to do so. Having an open garden where everyone can come in and say their opinion about the primeminister and this country would just make it an endless stream of caps-lock comments. Not a place where you’d want to go when you actually wanted to have a conversation (and not necessarily an argument to start with).

About two weeks before the primeminister started blogging, another celebrity started blogging. Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Mozilla fame, currently working with Ning. I think he’s an icon to many web youngsters around the globe, so it was a good move (albeit five years too late, if you ask me) for him to show some good examples and give some good advice. But then the comments started flowing in, and Marc just didn’t know what to do about them. And now they are gone - and not coming back. What a shame, I really think a thought through strategy would have helped him a lot. Don’t you?