Thinking about the future of Siemens‘ CEO-Blog

In the last two weeks Siemens had several communication thrills: The BenQ bankruptcy, the discussion on management board salaries, and the CEO-Blog of Klaus Kleinfeld. Comments of this internal blog have been published in German press. This further enforced the discussion on the plans to raise the management board salaries. Meanwhile these plans are history, today Kleinfeld announced the money will be part of a fund for Ex-staff of BenQ. From a PR point of view there’s still to consider the future of the CEO blog.

To give my two cents in this discussion: I totally agree with the position (two German posts) that it’s hard to divide internal and external communications. Articles of a internal magazine as well as posts of a internal blog may get public within minutes. But a main question at the moment is, whether Siemens really wants to establish a dialogue with its employees or even the public. If yes, the CEO blog should be continued and it would be worth thinking about opening the blog to everyone. If the blog in contrast would be closed many people would see this as a signal of command/control-PR and litte interest in dialogue. Especially in Change Communications this could be dangerous.

I’m courious how the story will continue.

Update (Oct. 06,2006): Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach is up to date – seems like the blog will be contiuned, comments are still open and they don’t moderate them. Great!