Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has some serious explaining to do about spending eight years posting comments on Yahoo’s stock community boards touting his company’s accomplishments, his own leadership skills, and taking pot shots at a company it is seeking to acquire — all under the online pseudonym Rahodeb (his wife Deborah’s name spelled backward). Mackey’s online alter ego was revealed in documents released by the Federal Trade Commission in its lawsuit seeking to block the Whole Foods takeover of Wild Oats on antitrust grounds.

Man alive, talk about setting your corporate communication strategy back about a decade. This isn’t what most PR professionals have in mind when they want to get their CEO to share his/her vision of the company and industry. I applaud Mackey’s willingness to engage with investors online, and the fact that he’s been at it for nearly a decade, shows he was into it for way more than the so-called fun of it, as we stated on his blog this week. The thought that high-level executives in other companies could also be doing this simply boggles the mind. I can just see corporate attorneys all over the country wagging their fingers at pro-social media types inside their organizations.

What was even more surprising to me about this story was a former SEC official saying he doubts Mackey’s behavior is illegal. If that’s true the government is even further behind the times when it comes to the age of Internet communications than I imagined.

Mike

Visible Technologies