Passionate Leadership

Forget the grass roots theories of social media.  Until the leadership of an organization believes in social media, it will remain a marginal marketing or PR or communications tool.  Employees might experiment with numerous, scattered initiatives, but without executive buy-in, little real organizational change occurs.   Worse, because the impact of the grass roots efforts is minimal, they can reinforce executive opinion that social media is not a major consideration. 

So how do you convince the CEO that social media is serious and should be integrated in all aspects of the business?

There are 3 key actions:

1.       Get the executives personally involved

2.    Conduct show-and-tell education sessions

3.      Demonstrate the ROI

Today, let’s consider executive involvement, and I’ll address education and ROI in later posts.

Connecting social media with a passion of the leadership positions social media as integral to the corporate objectives.  It becomes not just another technology channel, but a new means to achieve a vision or goal.  Personal involvement has been a key driver for many of the early successful companies. 

Bill Marriott, a great hotelier but not known for his technical expertise, loved the idea of engaging more directly with customers.  So he was enthusiastic when asked to write a blog.  He writes it himself as a way to talk with customers and employees. 

Not only did Marriott International use Twitter extensively to keep people updated at the time of the bombings at its hotels in Islamabad (2008) and Jakarta (2009), but Bill Marriott blogged to disseminate information, express sympathies, and ultimately share his perspectives and point of view.  Reaching out to people was important to Bill Marriott.  And dozens of people responded to the blogs. 

When Howard Shultz returned to Starbuck’s as CEO, he wanted to reconnect with customers.  MyStarbucksIdea was born, and it has become not only a major source of innovation and customer loyalty, but a major driver of changes to the internal culture.

Share how your leaders engage with social media – or how they don’t.