CEO Blogger Alert.

I met a CEO with a blog last night. Tom Glocer CEO of Reuters sees it as primarily an internal mechanism, but agreed that it has external ramifications - and that he needs to blog more frequently. But it's a start - one to which he's committed (regardless of the risk-averse concerns of some of his advisers) and if it were better known outside of Reuters, I imagine the external benefits might become more apparent to him.

He also gave an unexpected reason for Reuters' presence in Second Life - they have one full-time reporter in what, I believe, he said was their 198th press agency worldwide. They're there not so much for what is reported or for the potential sale of advertising on their virtual billboards, but because it will help the company to understand the expectations of today's 15 year olds in terms of user interfaces and customer experience when they grow up to be Reuter's clients in the real world.

Like other commentaters, I have never really got Second Life and some of the "virtual laboratory" claims made of it, as I have written here and here, but this is an approach that seems more liable to generate real insights.



Bonus link: This television report on the religious nature of the immersion of the virtual world aired a few weeks ago. It's the one labelled "virtual death".