A Social Media Savvy CEO?

In one of my classes, the guest CEO/chairman speaker was Shelly Lazarus (Ogilvy & Mather). When asked about her involvement/interest in social media, she mentioned that it was not yet worth getting into it, as nobody is sure of the returns on that investment. With all the buzz about social media, I found the comment startling. However, that seems to be the view echoed by the CEO’s of the top 100 companies of the Fortune 500, as highlighted in a survey conducted by UBERCEO.

Key Takeaways:
• None of the Fortune 100 CEOs have a blog.
• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
• No more than 19% of CEO’s have a personal Facebook page
• Just 13 CEO’s have LinkedIn profiles, only 3 having more than 10 connections.

As discussed in class, social media does provide an excellent platform for executives to connect and engage with their company's customers. And a lot of CEO’s are just doing that. A great example of a CEO who has used social media to his company's benefit is Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who has over 1.6 million followers on Twitter. Clearly, Zappos (now acquired by Amazon) is not a Fortune 100 company, but it's of respectable size with roughly $1 billion in annual revenue.

The key question that comes to my mind is this: Is it realistic to expect that Fortune 100 CEOs can engage their customers with social media well? Clearly, the CEO’s face a lot of regulatory constraints, which places limits on what they can communicate. In addition, they risk offending customers, partners or the Board of Directors with the added risk of litigation. Another key factor is time. Can a CEO really follow “conventional” wisdom around being social and be willing to tweet four or five 100-character statements a day? That’s a lot of time for a CEO. Even if he or she manages to do it, do consumers really want to connect and engage with the CEOs of these companies? Warren Buffett has less than 31,000 Twitter followers! One of the most revered investors has a miniscule number of followers in comparison to Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears. So, it's probably safe to say that consumers are not going to be terribly excited to tweet with Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup or Brian T. Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America. Most likely, all they care is the safety of their money in their bank account.

So, essentially, there are two sides to the story. Social media tools help the CEO to directly meet real customers and employees, without getting filtered by layers of mid management. In a way, it provides a first-hand knowledge gathering and monitoring framework which was unavailable to previous generation of CEO’s and can help them to be in tune with reality. At the same time, a half-hearted approach by CEOs will be easily picked up by customers and can cause incalculable damage to the brand. Social media is increasingly being used by brands in more sophisticated and enlightened ways and the CEO should exude that.

The other side is setting the balance between listening and disseminating. Initially, the CEO would have their CMO’s ghost write a blog to broadcast information, but didn’t pay much attention to comments from customers. That has changed now. Now, it’s more likely to be a two-way interaction and the pace of feedback makes it increasingly personalized. And every CEO will have a learning curve to get this balance right.

In the future, the Board of Directors will factor in “Social media skills” for evaluating potential CEO’s. So, this will have to be part of their arsenal to communicate with the Twitter and Facebook generation.

To quote Glen Hilton, CEO of ImageX media: A colleague asked “Whats your ROI on twitter”. I asked him what his ROI was with our relationship. He got it.
And in a crisis, having this kind of relationship with customers is invaluable. Just ask Akio Toyoda.

Aardvark is Terrible

Can someone please enlighten me on Google's decision to buy Aardvark for 50M? I have spent approximately 5 hours on the website today trying to figure out what Google saw in this company.

Things I have learned:

1) Site only has 90k users
2) The "experts" are pretty terrible
My question: Who is the most famous HBS professor?
Answer: This is very vague. There are many famous professors, especially the finance faculty.
3) Confused why I can't simply ask a question on my facebook status or twitter and get a response that way.

Thoughts on the site?

Search: What's the Big Deal?

Our class with Professor Rutz was a second go-around for me, and this time there were 3 key points that I took away:

• There is a value to both paid and unpaid search placement
• We are not the average internet users--while SOM students know "where to look" for organic search, the average internet user still seems to be fooled by paid search placement at the top of the screen
• It's crucial to test your model against a control group decision strategy to make sure that it's a useful tool, not just a pretty spreadsheet

However, a year after hearing the lecture for the first time, I've also got some opinions (and data) of my own.

Google's search functionality is losing ground. What's important now and for the future?

• Social search. Facebook has now overtaken Google in terms of page views, and in many cases is now the #1 referrer to any given website. That means we're now discovering branded content via our social graph more often than we're looking for anonymously linked content. This seems to be especially important for long tail content where consumers may not be seeking out the brand by name.
  
• Real time search. Twitter now serves 19 billion searches per month, more than both Yahoo and Bing (though still woefully short of Google's 88 billion). Where Google's algorithm focuses on linked content (giving particular weight to content that has been around a long time), Twitter turns this on its head and focuses on current content. This seems to be particularly important for brands who are focusing on thought leadership (policy issues, consultants, VC's, celebrities, journalists, etc)
  
• Push search. Foursquare "pushes" information to users about brands in their immediate area, rather than waiting for users to seek it out. Foursquare also rewards users for seeking out new information/brands. This puts control back in the hands of marketers, and seems to be very useful for consumer goods and local businesses.
  

I also vehemently disagree that SEO is something that should be left to the IT staff. The tools and techniques of Search Engine Optimization are at the fingertips of every marketer. Online copy should be written with SEO in mind. You can find more information on Copyblogger, and a bit more nuts and bolts from Avinash Kaushik.

How do you search for information?

Cause-Driven Social Media Management

In Social Media Management we’ve talked a lot about leveraging new media to pitch and push products, an angle of marketing I’ve never before had the opportunity to contemplate - there just aren’t all that many professional forest ecologists selling Snuggies, in my field…

I enrolled in the course because I am interested in working in the ENGO (environmental NGO) sphere, and wanted to learn to use the tools and strategy associated with social media and traditional marketing to disseminate ideas, rather than products, and to enroll supporters in causes and institutional missions, rather than purchasing sodas and Snuggie fan clubs. I’ve relished the opportunity to study the product side, however, because it’s so …different from anything I’ve been exposed to before, and has provided me with a diversity of food for thought to mull over as I think about how conservation practitioners can improve upon selling the product that is environmental conservation.

I’ve been having a lot of fun familiarizing myself with the social innovation/entrepreneurship enthusiast communities online this semester, and have built up a robust list of nonprofit and social entrepreneurship twitter feeds to follow, in addition to an already substantial blogroll. This post, “How Nonprofits can Leverage Geolocation Services,’ is a great example of the approach I’m trying to take in thinking about the role of new media in the ENGO sphere. I was particularly interested in the fact that Kanter is thinking about how FourSquare can be put to work for nonprofits, since it’s a question that I expect any nonprofits I begin working for this summer will be seeking to answer, as well.

Meredith

Digital Footprint

Digital footprint has been on my mind since I have been giving you guys feedback on your projects. This was emailed to me, and I thought that I would share this with you not so that you can apply for the grant (which of course you are welcome to do), but as an example of how valuable these skills are and how little companies know how to do effective digital marketing. Note the price tage = $1,000,000 per year (details to be discussed).



As background, NineSigma is in the innovation brokerage business. A company (the remains anonymous) solicits RFP (request for propsal) for an idea that requires a significant amount of creativity.



By the way, I probably will not apply for this, even though 1 mil per year could pay for a lot of post-docs!

Let's Talk Metrics, or What to do with TMI

One of the problems with social media metrics is there's just too much information available. In class today I mentioned a handful of links:

Social Media Metrics Tools

View more presentations from Devon Smith.

But where do you stop? Which metrics are the most important? Before you start talking strategy, it's helpful to get a lay of the land. We've talked about this as a "social media footprint," and I tend to like that image. You're looking for the digital footprints of a brand, collect enough of them and you can start to see the (social media) path they've chosen for themselves. Here are some of the metrics that made sense for Vocalo.org:

Social Media Footprint

View more documents from Devon Smith.

But once you know what you've got, how do you know where to spend your effort and monetary resources? One way is to create an index. Marc Schiller mentioned this. Basically, you want to give concrete values to both your efforts (things you post), and your impact (things other people post). I've worked on two different indicies, one for Facebook, and one for Twitter. It's a much longer report, so just check out page 5-10 for facebook, and pages 23-25 for Twitter.

Social Media in Theatre

View more documents from Devon Smith.

This was an example across firms in a single industry, you could also think of looking at a single firm across time.

Good luck!

30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business

30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business