Great blogs where you least expect it
Duncan SampleI was wondering what 'Plug-In' rooms were, so I visited the Marriott site to find out and discovered their blog...
After watching several DL.TV episodes that had very funky adverts for Plug In Marriott, a new feature to their hotel rooms (although, not in the UK for several years I bet).
I tried to find information on the normal Marriott site, but the homepage doesn't lend itself to finding things very easily if it isn't about finding a hotel/booking/checking a booking. I did notice a "Bill Marriott's blog" link though, so I went there... surely they've mentioned it, you'd think... well, yes, they had, but I ended up being more interested about the blog itself.
Quite a lot of companies have 'the CEO's blog', but I'd bet that not all of the CEOs (from 'traditional' global companies) actually blog, they probably have a ghost writer of some sort... Not Marriott. Bill Marriott (born 1932) seems to have taken to regular blogging (around once a week) in his stride.
How do you know he blogs and not just some faceless ghost writer? Well, take a look. Overall, it's just a normal corporate blog, every post has a nice photo, and there's a couple of buttons pointing you to subscribe to the RSS feed on various sites, but that's not what I was intrigued about... If you look closely under every post, you'll see that every blog post is also an audio blog post!
To begin with I thought it was a cunning bit of software so they could say their site was ultra-accessible, and if I listened, it would be the usual computerised voice... not so. Every post's audio is hosted by Bill himself!
To me, knowing that the person writing it is the CEO of such a big international company, yet he takes the time to host his blog himself, makes the experience of the blog even more interesting. Add to that the pleasant little jokes that he adds every-so-often and it's actually quite a good podcast to listen to, even if the content isn't your usual Friday night entertainment.
I would like to see more companies using this as one benchmark for the quality and regular appearance of the CEO and other similarly high-powered executives. Notice how the posts aren't huge, and they're not very formal, yet Bill gets what he wants to talk about said.
Congratulations Marriott, you understand.
