There's been a lot of opinion circulating recently on whether CEOs should blog.

On the positive side, there's the personal relationship blogging can build with customers, employees and other important audiences. On the negative side, there's the time commitment involved with keeping a blog rolling.

The president of the PR firm Makovsky & Company, Kenneth D. Makovsky, writes (second item) in Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog about why he started blogging:

What ultimately persuaded me to make the commitment was my conviction that, as public relations professionals, we must be in the vanguard of new channels of communication . . . particularly if we plan to deploy them on behalf of our clients. Blogs—and their close relations, podcasts—represent major breaks with traditional media. Unlike newspapers, television and radio (where we already have years of experience), to be perceived as experts in blogging, we have to be right down there in the trenches, doing it ourselves. It’s the only way to truly understand the pros and cons of blogging.

Moreover, I felt that having a blog would give me a great platform for communicating to a focused, relatively narrow segment of the vast universe of Internet users: clients and prospects, our employees, industry colleagues and other thought leaders.

Clearly, I agree with the concept of CEOs blogging -- I'm doing it myself, right now.

However, I'll offer a big caveat here. CEOs should not blog if those blogs are going to be ghostwritten and purely promotional. If you're going to do it, take advantage of all the medium has to offer and blog yourself. Sure, it's OK to have someone proofread your posts and, perhaps, fix any grammatical errors.

Don't, however, think that having a professional writer blog on your behalf will be worthwhile. In addition to risking attack in the blogging world, your readers will see through this in a minute and you'll lose the relationships you are trying to stengthen in the first place.