What's the first thing a potential investor does when trying to determine if you're worthy of managing their money? Or a reporter that's researching a story?  Or a prospect that's considering doing business with you? These days they look to see if you have a blog.  Sadly many executives use blogs the way teens use My*Space - they get too self-indulgent in what they write about with limited regard to what image they are portraying about their business or themselves as a leader.   Here are a few items I came across in my recent perusal of some CEO blogs.  No names are being used to protect the guilty (from themselves):

• Complaints about trying to obtain funding - this is a huge error in judgment as few people want to invest time and money in a highly risky company they know other intelligent people have passed up.  Even if you don't name the potential investors it sends a negative message and immediately portrays immaturity.
  
• Complaints about competitors' deep pockets.  Your job as CEO is to make the case of why you can sell around a deep-pocketed competitor!  Making the opposite case tells everyone, from customers to new employees, that your business is very risky.
  
• Blogging about their treatment by a reporter which attempts to set the record straight.  Very rarely is taking on a specific reporter a good idea, even if the reporter is wrong.  For most startups, few will likely have seen the article so it will pass quickly - unless you make it permanent by writing about it on your blog.  A better strategy is to look at what the reporter got wrong and use it as an opportunity to clarify your messaging so others won't make the same mistake, and taking the opportunity to link to positive press.  Taking on a reporter also sends a message to other reporters to stay away, costing you valuable press opportunities.
  
• A single blog entry meant to explain what their company does that would have filled 2 pages or more of a Word document.  One of the most important exercises you can do as a business owner is to get your message down to 2 perfect sentences or less.  Imagine the exact words you wish would appear in a news article and use them in various places.  Many times if your company is going to be covered a reporter will opt for some minor variant of that description.
  
• Using poor grammar, or using foul language on a personal blog because they think their personal blog and their businesses' blogs are actually different - They're not.  Anything you've chosen to make public is perfectly fair game for making judgments about you and whether you're responsible enough to run a company.  In fact, how you react in your personal blog is the most telling thing about you.
  

Some have told me not to bother writing about this because these errors simply separate the "wheat from the chaff" so to speak.  But from my brief review, this conduct in some form appears so rampant that I think it goes beyond Darwin.  I hope this serves as a reminder even to those that are better at managing their persona to  always remember that decisions about your credibility, maturity, leadership, and management style are constantly being judged.  The idea that an executive can write about these things and still garner the respect of people whose help they may need to get their business going is simply boneheaded.   Customers, partners, investors, employees, reporters - NONE of them should be privy to your pain, your rants, your disappointments.  Keep a private blog if you feel that writing is therapeutic for you -  the expression "its lonely at the top" exists for a reason.  That's why I call blogging the adult version of what teens are doing with their My*Space pages - creating an image about them they may regret in the future.

One more thing - It's a good idea to know which employees at your company have their own blogs and subscribe to them so you know what they are writing about - after all, they have made their blogs public.  I encourage you to publish clear instructions about what they are and are not allowed to discuss and ensure your company's ability to have them remove information harmful to the company by having this included in signed employee agreements.  
 
Developing a proper blogging strategy is one of the elements I tackle with my clients to ensure they use this tool correctly.  I'd be interested in any CEO blogs you've come across that break these rules.