The Social Media Revolution Begins

Let’s start our journey with Google - the Alpha and Omega of the Internet. In the beginning, there was search. One of the very first things people needed when the Internet started to gain popularity was a way of finding information. Eventually, Google emerged as the search leader because the engine found things quickly through a simple interface that it maintains today. This type of search worked well until the growth of Internet users dictated using more so-phisticated methods. It became clear that people would congregate in groups around shared experiences such as videos and music. Search, though, had moved on. It was now looking for something that told you more about the groups people connected in. This is where Facebook came in because it could suggest the products these groups used and allow you to advertise to them. This use of tailored ads created the phenomenon of ”Social Search.” A similar sort of service, LinkedIn, grew up at the same time for the business world to help people who wanted to use social networking in a commercial context. Layered on top of these social networks were micro-blogging services like Twitter. These networks can be linked to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yammer, a sort of corporate Twitter.

Mobile Applications and the Future of Social Media

Just when corporate professionals thought you understood social media, mobile arrived with soft-ware like Foursquare (a geo-tagged twitter service) to bring a new dimension to connecting with others. Now we have the phenomenon of Mobile, Social, Search. Companies are just beginning to develop propositions to address the blending of these three concepts.

Clearly, there’s been a land grab going on in social media. When Google was unable to agree to a deal with Facebook, it meant that it wouldn’t have access to its Social graph. Google executives re-sponded by creating their own social service - Google Plus. Although this has not been widely taken up yet, companies that use it can affect their SEO disproportionately because Google designed it that way. They also decided that they would no longer take the stream of social data from Twitter, rendering the micro-blogging platform an inefficient way of improving organic SEO.

So now we have an overall picture. All of these media are reflexive. They can be linked and feed off each other.

The net result is that like homesteaders in the Wild West, brands, companies, people, institutions, and ideas are surrounded sometimes by quite a hostile audience. The only difference is that there is no Seventh Cavalry.

So in summary, a rosette of social channels has grown up to surround brands which, taken collec-tively, can also affect the web’s ability to locate those brands.

Reputation Management and Social Media

Now let’s pause for an experiment. Take your name, your organization, or your favorite charity and Google it. Of the first fifty returns, how many have originated from you? Is it more than half? If so, you’re in good shape. You still control your brand. If it’s less than half, someone else is controlling your brand. If searchers can’t find your material, then by definition they find someone else’s information about your brand.

Let’s be clear – these channels will be used, so you’d better be sure it’s you that’s using them. Brand journalism is not going away, and the demand for fast-moving and short-lived but high-quality digi-tal assets is only going to grow. Some of these assets will belong to you. Some will belong to others. These brand journalists will become curators of these assets. Obviously, this content will need to interpret the brand creatively and support it. This was recognized early by the phrase ‘Content is King’. If this is true, then its Queen will be imperative. More than half of the social content that circu-lates is comment on news events. So the Creative and Imperative will need to work closely together.

Speed VS Truth

Although Twitter appears to be an odd-one out, the sheer speed of Twitter is worth a special men-tion. Whereas Google updates every 90 minutes, Twitter cycles in 45 seconds, which means that news travels exceptionally fast. Such speed has a profound impact on the amount of truth we have in our news.

The relationship was always an inverse one with faster speeds indicating less truth. Twitter made the inverse relationship steeper. Now, we routinely see stories circulating that turn out later to be completely untrue, which can create fear, uncertainty, and immediate ‘certainties’. Think Lehman Brothers or WMD or Arthur Andersen. In the latter case, it was comprehensively shown that the firm did not shred documents for its client, Enron, but by the time the traditional system of justice - the law - caught up, it was too late. This has profound consequences for the make-up of boards. Our two greatest protectors of shareholder values are the General Counsel and CFO. Social media can profoundly affect value and perception (truth) in the time it takes counsel to put pen to paper. Yet social media responsibility remains suborned deep in the bowels of the corporation.

Executive Summary

Revolutions are misleading. Seldom are they about a single event. Instead, they are more about a series of events with each triggered by its predecessor. The social media revolu-tion is no different.

Making sense of the social media revolu-tion is hard because the revolution seems piecemeal to many people. It only seems to make sense in hindsight because the new tools are being picked up and used by chal-lenger brands almost experimentally. At any stage, there’s a lot of work in progress. When something works, it’s not unsurprising that people keep quiet about it, but it catches on nevertheless. In every respect, it conforms to Everett Roger’s famous Adoption Curve of In-novation, later developed into the theory of market evolution.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have responsibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future customers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it becomes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

CEO Responsibility with Social Media

As a CEO, you may now be saying, “well, I can leave all this to marketing.” You can, of course, but there’s something else. The ability to triage these imperative creative assets gives you the ability to assess a conversation and hence, the mood. Tools likes Radian 6 and Sysomos allow you to gauge what people are talking about online. Think of it like being at a dinner party where you’d like to join in the conversation but need to listen before you start. This understanding allows CEOs to do two things: 1) to use an audit trail as to the precise timing of an action and 2) to be able to assess what a competitor is doing.

The ability to look over the other side of the hill to provides the opportunity for greater situational fluency or the ‘Command of Now.’ In military terms, first it was hills, then balloons, then aircraft, then satellites that allowed the commander to see further. Now social media can provide new intelligence about what people are thinking.

Companies also have the option to float ideas with their communities and to involve them actively in research. In the jargon of social media, this type of social media focus group is called ‘crowd sourcing.’ This type of diurnal engagement can be useful when trying to address customers’ real concerns.

Role Assignment in Social Media

One of the questions often asked about this type of marketing engagement is who is doing this role in the traditional establish-ment. Within marketing outreach, the function that normally engages with outside audience every day of the week and twice on Sunday is the PR department. Especially so when dealing with a crisis. Many times an overly sensitive company has put out a statement on a problem only to find they didn’t have one – until they put out the statement. Perhaps if BP had used that type of listening technique it would have seen the brand adhesion that the Transocean rig fire was having.

Social media can be a vital tool in allowing the CEO to use their best judgment with information from the company’s customers. The ‘J-word’ is, after all, the only thing senior leaders have. It’s criti-cal to investors, shareholders, staff, customers and peers. Most of the time senior leaders have been exposed for poor judgment, it relates to a misjudgment or misreading of mood, which applies as much to Tony Hayward at BP as it does to Dick Fuld at Lehmans.

The recession adds poignancy to the messages that leadership emanates. Frequent, unfortunate juxtapositions, such as hefty senior bonuses alongside group redundancies, bring this issue to the fore. The need for joined up communications has never been greater. This is as true personally as it is corporately. In recession, the wealthy and powerful need to tread sensitively. At present, it’s like the senior people are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. Social media showers 1,000 sparks a year on it. They need to spot which spark can set off the gunpowder. You cannot have the presence of positivity in communications, without first ensuring the absence of negativity.

Using Social Media to Brand a Company

It’s not all about the shield. Social media can be an effective sword as well. Leadership has never been under as much scrutiny as it is now. Some elements of the generation coming through see their leaders as having damaged the economy, their retirement, the planet, their trust, and their prospects for the future. Groups like the Occupy Movement are themselves a social media phenom-enon. They also provide an insight into understanding a mindset that wants less consumption, more sustainability, and more qual-ity. Make no mistake if you thought there was a generation gap in the Sixties, this one is a chasm. The youngest generation of adults has long turned its back on email as a communication medium; instead this generation is the child of social media. They are quite possibly the most connected young group ever in the history of mankind.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have respon-sibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future custom-ers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it be-comes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Learning to Leverage Social Media

Think of the early days of the arrival of the personal computer. The use of guidelines, security, and policy was what turned an initially chaotic technology into the corporate essential it became. Social media will do to communications what the personal computer did to data processing.

An entire generation needed to learn how to use the personal computer to be successful, but many failed. The boardroom generation grew up on this technology but in some cases is even more luddite than the general population. Leadership can’t afford this self-indulgence but instead should keep challenging itself. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate complacency is by choosing outdated methods of commu-nication.

The use of social media for communication can lead to some odd effects. When a company begins to use social media, the leadership team can be seen and heard much more clearly and in real-time, which is in some ways akin to tearing away the shower curtain. It can precipitate the rapid covering of sensitive areas. Equally, it can also encourage an over-exag-gerated sense of pride, where leaders start to hog the lime-light and primp and pose. Either is undesirable because the challenge is to use social media in a way that feels natural for your organization.

Social Media in the Workplace

Leveraging social media can send powerful messages, how-ever. A CEO that decides to present casually dressed is saying it’s OK to dress like me. The use of social media can send the message that it’s OK to be informal. Judging what tone the organization has and importantly should have in the future is the CEO’s job. Telling employees that you want the company to be dynamic and innovative in a round robin email won’t work. It’s a show, not a tell. If you want people to listen to your updates, record them and then distribute on corporate social media systems like Yammer. You can also use groups on LinkedIn, hang outs on Google Plus, and YouTube for mes-sages you want to go external.

A warning here! Some companies feel so threatened by the loss of control that they have tried to ban social media from the office. These executives are worried about the sheer time suck it causes on their staff and can take the form of device confiscation at reception or tracking and recording what people say. Sure enough, these methods stop social media use during work time, but they increase it dramatically else-where and sometimes with unpleasant consequences for the

brand. I’ve heard social media be referred to a sense of entitle-ment by older generations. It is. They’re quite right. Generation C is entitled to your trust. Judge them on their output not their methods. Supply them with the content to be brand evangelists.

This new generation is one where text and reading are less im-portant than knowledge of how to convey a message. They are growing up multilingual in an environment where the languages are video, graphics, and short bursts of truncated text. In one re-spect, though, they are similar to every other generation. They do not always make the right decisions about what is appropri-ate behavior. In fairness, when some employers monitor social media, before and after interview, the boundaries can become blurred. This blurring is where well thought out planning and procedures can make a big difference. ALL of your employees are potential brand advocates. As a young colleague told me, “control is so very twentieth century.” The problem is, of course, that most of us in business at the current time are a bit Twentieth Century.

The procedures are never more important than when a social media firestorm breaks out. You cannot allow policy and judg-ment to be dictated solely by those who understand the me-dium. That’s why YOU have to understand. Think of the three R’s – systems have to be Ready 24/7. They have to be Rehearsed with regular fire drills. They also have to be Reliant on a team of people organized into a chain of command.

The Social Media Revolution Begins

Let’s start our journey with Google - the Alpha and Omega of the Internet. In the beginning, there was search. One of the very first things people needed when the Internet started to gain popularity was a way of finding information. Eventually, Google emerged as the search leader because the engine found things quickly through a simple interface that it maintains today. This type of search worked well until the growth of Internet users dictated using more so-phisticated methods. It became clear that people would congregate in groups around shared experiences such as videos and music. Search, though, had moved on. It was now looking for something that told you more about the groups people connected in. This is where Facebook came in because it could suggest the products these groups used and allow you to advertise to them. This use of tailored ads created the phenomenon of ”Social Search.” A similar sort of service, LinkedIn, grew up at the same time for the business world to help people who wanted to use social networking in a commercial context. Layered on top of these social networks were micro-blogging services like Twitter. These networks can be linked to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yammer, a sort of corporate Twitter.

Mobile Applications and the Future of Social Media

Just when corporate professionals thought you understood social media, mobile arrived with soft-ware like Foursquare (a geo-tagged twitter service) to bring a new dimension to connecting with others. Now we have the phenomenon of Mobile, Social, Search. Companies are just beginning to develop propositions to address the blending of these three concepts.

Clearly, there’s been a land grab going on in social media. When Google was unable to agree to a deal with Facebook, it meant that it wouldn’t have access to its Social graph. Google executives re-sponded by creating their own social service - Google Plus. Although this has not been widely taken up yet, companies that use it can affect their SEO disproportionately because Google designed it that way. They also decided that they would no longer take the stream of social data from Twitter, rendering the micro-blogging platform an inefficient way of improving organic SEO.

So now we have an overall picture. All of these media are reflexive. They can be linked and feed off each other.

The net result is that like homesteaders in the Wild West, brands, companies, people, institutions, and ideas are surrounded sometimes by quite a hostile audience. The only difference is that there is no Seventh Cavalry.

So in summary, a rosette of social channels has grown up to surround brands which, taken collec-tively, can also affect the web’s ability to locate those brands.

Reputation Management and Social Media

Now let’s pause for an experiment. Take your name, your organization, or your favorite charity and Google it. Of the first fifty returns, how many have originated from you? Is it more than half? If so, you’re in good shape. You still control your brand. If it’s less than half, someone else is controlling your brand. If searchers can’t find your material, then by definition they find someone else’s information about your brand.

Let’s be clear – these channels will be used, so you’d better be sure it’s you that’s using them. Brand journalism is not going away, and the demand for fast-moving and short-lived but high-quality digi-tal assets is only going to grow. Some of these assets will belong to you. Some will belong to others. These brand journalists will become curators of these assets. Obviously, this content will need to interpret the brand creatively and support it. This was recognized early by the phrase ‘Content is King’. If this is true, then its Queen will be imperative. More than half of the social content that circu-lates is comment on news events. So the Creative and Imperative will need to work closely together.

Speed VS Truth

Although Twitter appears to be an odd-one out, the sheer speed of Twitter is worth a special men-tion. Whereas Google updates every 90 minutes, Twitter cycles in 45 seconds, which means that news travels exceptionally fast. Such speed has a profound impact on the amount of truth we have in our news.

The relationship was always an inverse one with faster speeds indicating less truth. Twitter made the inverse relationship steeper. Now, we routinely see stories circulating that turn out later to be completely untrue, which can create fear, uncertainty, and immediate ‘certainties’. Think Lehman Brothers or WMD or Arthur Andersen. In the latter case, it was comprehensively shown that the firm did not shred documents for its client, Enron, but by the time the traditional system of justice - the law - caught up, it was too late. This has profound consequences for the make-up of boards. Our two greatest protectors of shareholder values are the General Counsel and CFO. Social media can profoundly affect value and perception (truth) in the time it takes counsel to put pen to paper. Yet social media responsibility remains suborned deep in the bowels of the corporation.

Executive Summary

Revolutions are misleading. Seldom are they about a single event. Instead, they are more about a series of events with each triggered by its predecessor. The social media revolu-tion is no different.

Making sense of the social media revolu-tion is hard because the revolution seems piecemeal to many people. It only seems to make sense in hindsight because the new tools are being picked up and used by chal-lenger brands almost experimentally. At any stage, there’s a lot of work in progress. When something works, it’s not unsurprising that people keep quiet about it, but it catches on nevertheless. In every respect, it conforms to Everett Roger’s famous Adoption Curve of In-novation, later developed into the theory of market evolution.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have responsibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future customers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it becomes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

CEO Responsibility with Social Media

As a CEO, you may now be saying, “well, I can leave all this to marketing.” You can, of course, but there’s something else. The ability to triage these imperative creative assets gives you the ability to assess a conversation and hence, the mood. Tools likes Radian 6 and Sysomos allow you to gauge what people are talking about online. Think of it like being at a dinner party where you’d like to join in the conversation but need to listen before you start. This understanding allows CEOs to do two things: 1) to use an audit trail as to the precise timing of an action and 2) to be able to assess what a competitor is doing.

The ability to look over the other side of the hill to provides the opportunity for greater situational fluency or the ‘Command of Now.’ In military terms, first it was hills, then balloons, then aircraft, then satellites that allowed the commander to see further. Now social media can provide new intelligence about what people are thinking.

Companies also have the option to float ideas with their communities and to involve them actively in research. In the jargon of social media, this type of social media focus group is called ‘crowd sourcing.’ This type of diurnal engagement can be useful when trying to address customers’ real concerns.

Role Assignment in Social Media

One of the questions often asked about this type of marketing engagement is who is doing this role in the traditional establish-ment. Within marketing outreach, the function that normally engages with outside audience every day of the week and twice on Sunday is the PR department. Especially so when dealing with a crisis. Many times an overly sensitive company has put out a statement on a problem only to find they didn’t have one – until they put out the statement. Perhaps if BP had used that type of listening technique it would have seen the brand adhesion that the Transocean rig fire was having.

Social media can be a vital tool in allowing the CEO to use their best judgment with information from the company’s customers. The ‘J-word’ is, after all, the only thing senior leaders have. It’s criti-cal to investors, shareholders, staff, customers and peers. Most of the time senior leaders have been exposed for poor judgment, it relates to a misjudgment or misreading of mood, which applies as much to Tony Hayward at BP as it does to Dick Fuld at Lehmans.

The recession adds poignancy to the messages that leadership emanates. Frequent, unfortunate juxtapositions, such as hefty senior bonuses alongside group redundancies, bring this issue to the fore. The need for joined up communications has never been greater. This is as true personally as it is corporately. In recession, the wealthy and powerful need to tread sensitively. At present, it’s like the senior people are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. Social media showers 1,000 sparks a year on it. They need to spot which spark can set off the gunpowder. You cannot have the presence of positivity in communications, without first ensuring the absence of negativity.

Using Social Media to Brand a Company

It’s not all about the shield. Social media can be an effective sword as well. Leadership has never been under as much scrutiny as it is now. Some elements of the generation coming through see their leaders as having damaged the economy, their retirement, the planet, their trust, and their prospects for the future. Groups like the Occupy Movement are themselves a social media phenom-enon. They also provide an insight into understanding a mindset that wants less consumption, more sustainability, and more qual-ity. Make no mistake if you thought there was a generation gap in the Sixties, this one is a chasm. The youngest generation of adults has long turned its back on email as a communication medium; instead this generation is the child of social media. They are quite possibly the most connected young group ever in the history of mankind.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have respon-sibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future custom-ers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it be-comes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Learning to Leverage Social Media

Think of the early days of the arrival of the personal computer. The use of guidelines, security, and policy was what turned an initially chaotic technology into the corporate essential it became. Social media will do to communications what the personal computer did to data processing.

An entire generation needed to learn how to use the personal computer to be successful, but many failed. The boardroom generation grew up on this technology but in some cases is even more luddite than the general population. Leadership can’t afford this self-indulgence but instead should keep challenging itself. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate complacency is by choosing outdated methods of commu-nication.

The use of social media for communication can lead to some odd effects. When a company begins to use social media, the leadership team can be seen and heard much more clearly and in real-time, which is in some ways akin to tearing away the shower curtain. It can precipitate the rapid covering of sensitive areas. Equally, it can also encourage an over-exag-gerated sense of pride, where leaders start to hog the lime-light and primp and pose. Either is undesirable because the challenge is to use social media in a way that feels natural for your organization.

Social Media in the Workplace

Leveraging social media can send powerful messages, how-ever. A CEO that decides to present casually dressed is saying it’s OK to dress like me. The use of social media can send the message that it’s OK to be informal. Judging what tone the organization has and importantly should have in the future is the CEO’s job. Telling employees that you want the company to be dynamic and innovative in a round robin email won’t work. It’s a show, not a tell. If you want people to listen to your updates, record them and then distribute on corporate social media systems like Yammer. You can also use groups on LinkedIn, hang outs on Google Plus, and YouTube for mes-sages you want to go external.

A warning here! Some companies feel so threatened by the loss of control that they have tried to ban social media from the office. These executives are worried about the sheer time suck it causes on their staff and can take the form of device confiscation at reception or tracking and recording what people say. Sure enough, these methods stop social media use during work time, but they increase it dramatically else-where and sometimes with unpleasant consequences for the

brand. I’ve heard social media be referred to a sense of entitle-ment by older generations. It is. They’re quite right. Generation C is entitled to your trust. Judge them on their output not their methods. Supply them with the content to be brand evangelists.

This new generation is one where text and reading are less im-portant than knowledge of how to convey a message. They are growing up multilingual in an environment where the languages are video, graphics, and short bursts of truncated text. In one re-spect, though, they are similar to every other generation. They do not always make the right decisions about what is appropri-ate behavior. In fairness, when some employers monitor social media, before and after interview, the boundaries can become blurred. This blurring is where well thought out planning and procedures can make a big difference. ALL of your employees are potential brand advocates. As a young colleague told me, “control is so very twentieth century.” The problem is, of course, that most of us in business at the current time are a bit Twentieth Century.

The procedures are never more important than when a social media firestorm breaks out. You cannot allow policy and judg-ment to be dictated solely by those who understand the me-dium. That’s why YOU have to understand. Think of the three R’s – systems have to be Ready 24/7. They have to be Rehearsed with regular fire drills. They also have to be Reliant on a team of people organized into a chain of command.

The Social Media Revolution Begins

Let’s start our journey with Google - the Alpha and Omega of the Internet. In the beginning, there was search. One of the very first things people needed when the Internet started to gain popularity was a way of finding information. Eventually, Google emerged as the search leader because the engine found things quickly through a simple interface that it maintains today. This type of search worked well until the growth of Internet users dictated using more so-phisticated methods. It became clear that people would congregate in groups around shared experiences such as videos and music. Search, though, had moved on. It was now looking for something that told you more about the groups people connected in. This is where Facebook came in because it could suggest the products these groups used and allow you to advertise to them. This use of tailored ads created the phenomenon of ”Social Search.” A similar sort of service, LinkedIn, grew up at the same time for the business world to help people who wanted to use social networking in a commercial context. Layered on top of these social networks were micro-blogging services like Twitter. These networks can be linked to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yammer, a sort of corporate Twitter.

Mobile Applications and the Future of Social Media

Just when corporate professionals thought you understood social media, mobile arrived with soft-ware like Foursquare (a geo-tagged twitter service) to bring a new dimension to connecting with others. Now we have the phenomenon of Mobile, Social, Search. Companies are just beginning to develop propositions to address the blending of these three concepts.

Clearly, there’s been a land grab going on in social media. When Google was unable to agree to a deal with Facebook, it meant that it wouldn’t have access to its Social graph. Google executives re-sponded by creating their own social service - Google Plus. Although this has not been widely taken up yet, companies that use it can affect their SEO disproportionately because Google designed it that way. They also decided that they would no longer take the stream of social data from Twitter, rendering the micro-blogging platform an inefficient way of improving organic SEO.

So now we have an overall picture. All of these media are reflexive. They can be linked and feed off each other.

The net result is that like homesteaders in the Wild West, brands, companies, people, institutions, and ideas are surrounded sometimes by quite a hostile audience. The only difference is that there is no Seventh Cavalry.

So in summary, a rosette of social channels has grown up to surround brands which, taken collec-tively, can also affect the web’s ability to locate those brands.

Reputation Management and Social Media

Now let’s pause for an experiment. Take your name, your organization, or your favorite charity and Google it. Of the first fifty returns, how many have originated from you? Is it more than half? If so, you’re in good shape. You still control your brand. If it’s less than half, someone else is controlling your brand. If searchers can’t find your material, then by definition they find someone else’s information about your brand.

Let’s be clear – these channels will be used, so you’d better be sure it’s you that’s using them. Brand journalism is not going away, and the demand for fast-moving and short-lived but high-quality digi-tal assets is only going to grow. Some of these assets will belong to you. Some will belong to others. These brand journalists will become curators of these assets. Obviously, this content will need to interpret the brand creatively and support it. This was recognized early by the phrase ‘Content is King’. If this is true, then its Queen will be imperative. More than half of the social content that circu-lates is comment on news events. So the Creative and Imperative will need to work closely together.

Speed VS Truth

Although Twitter appears to be an odd-one out, the sheer speed of Twitter is worth a special men-tion. Whereas Google updates every 90 minutes, Twitter cycles in 45 seconds, which means that news travels exceptionally fast. Such speed has a profound impact on the amount of truth we have in our news.

The relationship was always an inverse one with faster speeds indicating less truth. Twitter made the inverse relationship steeper. Now, we routinely see stories circulating that turn out later to be completely untrue, which can create fear, uncertainty, and immediate ‘certainties’. Think Lehman Brothers or WMD or Arthur Andersen. In the latter case, it was comprehensively shown that the firm did not shred documents for its client, Enron, but by the time the traditional system of justice - the law - caught up, it was too late. This has profound consequences for the make-up of boards. Our two greatest protectors of shareholder values are the General Counsel and CFO. Social media can profoundly affect value and perception (truth) in the time it takes counsel to put pen to paper. Yet social media responsibility remains suborned deep in the bowels of the corporation.

Executive Summary

Revolutions are misleading. Seldom are they about a single event. Instead, they are more about a series of events with each triggered by its predecessor. The social media revolu-tion is no different.

Making sense of the social media revolu-tion is hard because the revolution seems piecemeal to many people. It only seems to make sense in hindsight because the new tools are being picked up and used by chal-lenger brands almost experimentally. At any stage, there’s a lot of work in progress. When something works, it’s not unsurprising that people keep quiet about it, but it catches on nevertheless. In every respect, it conforms to Everett Roger’s famous Adoption Curve of In-novation, later developed into the theory of market evolution.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have responsibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future customers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it becomes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

CEO Responsibility with Social Media

As a CEO, you may now be saying, “well, I can leave all this to marketing.” You can, of course, but there’s something else. The ability to triage these imperative creative assets gives you the ability to assess a conversation and hence, the mood. Tools likes Radian 6 and Sysomos allow you to gauge what people are talking about online. Think of it like being at a dinner party where you’d like to join in the conversation but need to listen before you start. This understanding allows CEOs to do two things: 1) to use an audit trail as to the precise timing of an action and 2) to be able to assess what a competitor is doing.

The ability to look over the other side of the hill to provides the opportunity for greater situational fluency or the ‘Command of Now.’ In military terms, first it was hills, then balloons, then aircraft, then satellites that allowed the commander to see further. Now social media can provide new intelligence about what people are thinking.

Companies also have the option to float ideas with their communities and to involve them actively in research. In the jargon of social media, this type of social media focus group is called ‘crowd sourcing.’ This type of diurnal engagement can be useful when trying to address customers’ real concerns.

Role Assignment in Social Media

One of the questions often asked about this type of marketing engagement is who is doing this role in the traditional establish-ment. Within marketing outreach, the function that normally engages with outside audience every day of the week and twice on Sunday is the PR department. Especially so when dealing with a crisis. Many times an overly sensitive company has put out a statement on a problem only to find they didn’t have one – until they put out the statement. Perhaps if BP had used that type of listening technique it would have seen the brand adhesion that the Transocean rig fire was having.

Social media can be a vital tool in allowing the CEO to use their best judgment with information from the company’s customers. The ‘J-word’ is, after all, the only thing senior leaders have. It’s criti-cal to investors, shareholders, staff, customers and peers. Most of the time senior leaders have been exposed for poor judgment, it relates to a misjudgment or misreading of mood, which applies as much to Tony Hayward at BP as it does to Dick Fuld at Lehmans.

The recession adds poignancy to the messages that leadership emanates. Frequent, unfortunate juxtapositions, such as hefty senior bonuses alongside group redundancies, bring this issue to the fore. The need for joined up communications has never been greater. This is as true personally as it is corporately. In recession, the wealthy and powerful need to tread sensitively. At present, it’s like the senior people are sitting on a keg of gunpowder. Social media showers 1,000 sparks a year on it. They need to spot which spark can set off the gunpowder. You cannot have the presence of positivity in communications, without first ensuring the absence of negativity.

Using Social Media to Brand a Company

It’s not all about the shield. Social media can be an effective sword as well. Leadership has never been under as much scrutiny as it is now. Some elements of the generation coming through see their leaders as having damaged the economy, their retirement, the planet, their trust, and their prospects for the future. Groups like the Occupy Movement are themselves a social media phenom-enon. They also provide an insight into understanding a mindset that wants less consumption, more sustainability, and more qual-ity. Make no mistake if you thought there was a generation gap in the Sixties, this one is a chasm. The youngest generation of adults has long turned its back on email as a communication medium; instead this generation is the child of social media. They are quite possibly the most connected young group ever in the history of mankind.

If we accept that one of the defining characteristics of leaders is their ability to understand what will be, then leaders have respon-sibilities here. You can try to understand the future on issues, but it’s confusing. It’s better to try and understand a point of view, which is essential for getting the right tone, style and channel for recruitment as well as community engagement. “Getting it right” can save massive amounts of costs as well. Generation C is one of the easiest and cheapest to communicate with ever.

To get your message out, whether it is to attract future custom-ers, find employees, or lure stakeholders, you have to use their channels of communication. In any case, the right social media can increase the surface area of contact that people have with their leader. Importantly, this is not invested in one person but an entire group of leaders. For this reason, then, social media needs policy, procedures, and planning. Get this right and you give your team the confidence to use the channels. Get it wrong and it be-comes a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Learning to Leverage Social Media

Think of the early days of the arrival of the personal computer. The use of guidelines, security, and policy was what turned an initially chaotic technology into the corporate essential it became. Social media will do to communications what the personal computer did to data processing.

An entire generation needed to learn how to use the personal computer to be successful, but many failed. The boardroom generation grew up on this technology but in some cases is even more luddite than the general population. Leadership can’t afford this self-indulgence but instead should keep challenging itself. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate complacency is by choosing outdated methods of commu-nication.

The use of social media for communication can lead to some odd effects. When a company begins to use social media, the leadership team can be seen and heard much more clearly and in real-time, which is in some ways akin to tearing away the shower curtain. It can precipitate the rapid covering of sensitive areas. Equally, it can also encourage an over-exag-gerated sense of pride, where leaders start to hog the lime-light and primp and pose. Either is undesirable because the challenge is to use social media in a way that feels natural for your organization.

Social Media in the Workplace

Leveraging social media can send powerful messages, how-ever. A CEO that decides to present casually dressed is saying it’s OK to dress like me. The use of social media can send the message that it’s OK to be informal. Judging what tone the organization has and importantly should have in the future is the CEO’s job. Telling employees that you want the company to be dynamic and innovative in a round robin email won’t work. It’s a show, not a tell. If you want people to listen to your updates, record them and then distribute on corporate social media systems like Yammer. You can also use groups on LinkedIn, hang outs on Google Plus, and YouTube for mes-sages you want to go external.

A warning here! Some companies feel so threatened by the loss of control that they have tried to ban social media from the office. These executives are worried about the sheer time suck it causes on their staff and can take the form of device confiscation at reception or tracking and recording what people say. Sure enough, these methods stop social media use during work time, but they increase it dramatically else-where and sometimes with unpleasant consequences for the

brand. I’ve heard social media be referred to a sense of entitle-ment by older generations. It is. They’re quite right. Generation C is entitled to your trust. Judge them on their output not their methods. Supply them with the content to be brand evangelists.

This new generation is one where text and reading are less im-portant than knowledge of how to convey a message. They are growing up multilingual in an environment where the languages are video, graphics, and short bursts of truncated text. In one re-spect, though, they are similar to every other generation. They do not always make the right decisions about what is appropri-ate behavior. In fairness, when some employers monitor social media, before and after interview, the boundaries can become blurred. This blurring is where well thought out planning and procedures can make a big difference. ALL of your employees are potential brand advocates. As a young colleague told me, “control is so very twentieth century.” The problem is, of course, that most of us in business at the current time are a bit Twentieth Century.

The procedures are never more important than when a social media firestorm breaks out. You cannot allow policy and judg-ment to be dictated solely by those who understand the me-dium. That’s why YOU have to understand. Think of the three R’s – systems have to be Ready 24/7. They have to be Rehearsed with regular fire drills. They also have to be Reliant on a team of people organized into a chain of command.