Showcase: Marriott on the Move – the Blog of Bill Marriott

Posted July 21st, 2010 / By Brandon Cox in Misc

Have you ever met someone who had been married 55 years, was the CEO of one of the world’s largest and nicest hotel chains, and runs a pretty sweet blog? Meet Bill Marriott! And how did I know he’d been married for 55 years? He blogged about it.

As stated on the about page:

The purpose of this blog is to give you a forum to interact with Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International. We believe Marriott is more than just the world’s largest lodging company with more than 3,000 hotels around the world.

We’re proud of our culture, history, service excellence, and especially our 151,000* associates whose Spirit to Serve makes us so successful. Part of what makes us great is our belief in service to the customer and “Success is Never Final.”

This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we’ve nurtured since 1927. We are delighted you have decided to visit us, and we will do our best to make it a valuable experience for you.

The beauty of this blog isn’t in its rather basic design, but in the portal it opens between the average consumer/reader/guest and the CEO of an enormous operation. The company apparently recognizes this corporate blog for what it is, a mechanism to open the communication lines to the very top.

The blog does a great job at being social on the surface, providing links to other profiles and the company itself while allowing comments on posts, but one thread caught my attention on a post about offering points to timeshare owners. It seems there is debate about the points system, but reading between the lines reveals that there’s another debate going on between those who claim their comments aren’t being posted, and others whose negative comments are showing up just fine. Whatever the issue is, the negative factor that stands out is a lack of response, even in intervals.

What I love most about this blog is a very simple point: it’s a CEO, blogging for himself (in his own words, that is) about his company and his life. It’s quite a difficult task to convince C-suite executives of the value of working hard on their own content when they’re so busy with so many other tasks. Bill Marriott seemingly gets it.

What do you think? What does Bill get right or wrong? What can we learn from his blogging efforts?

In addition to serving as Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, Brandon is also a Pastor at Saddleback Church and Online Community Coordinator for Pastors.com. He’s also a web designer, blogger, and church communications consultant. Catch him on his own blog or on Twitter.