Media

Chris Perry (@cperry248) who is our digital communications president, wrote this really good post on Forbes about social CEOs. I am taking the liberty of repeating his 5 must-dos for CEOs wanting to get social or even considering it.

I would probably add one more and that is to find yourself a buddy who can read your Tweets as a sounding board when you first get started. I think that that second opinions can save oneself from having a red face and worth the try until you feel comfortable enough to try it alone.  And maybe it’s worth having a buddy just as good practice when it comes to Tweeting or even Facebook.  They might not be good golfing buddies but hey, this is a new age. Take his advice. It is seriously good.

Here they are…..straight from Chris.

Realize you shine bright in social mediums.

Social media participation is a public appearance where everything is on the record. Assume that comments will be picked up by the press as well as examined closely by your customers, staff and others watching your company. Speak and act accordingly.

Recognize your role as Chief Narrator.

Social platforms like Twitter aren’t a sounding board for a CEOs innermost thoughts; they’re an extension of other modes of communication you use as the lead executive of your organization. There’s great opportunity to share thoughts on your company or industry issues that get amplified through networks that reach employees, investors, customers and the press. As with existing communications efforts have a plan in place as you engage.

Anticipate social remarks being a part of a permanent public record.

Avoid posting or tweeting on topics that you would never discuss aloud in a public forum. Badmouthing competitors, going too deep into personal affairs or speaking about divisive issues is not the way to go. Don’t be gun-shy when engaging online, but anticipate that what you say will generate the same reaction as if it were published in the press.

Don’t court controversy if you can’t take the heat.

Opinions on relevant industry issues and current events that affect your business are fine. But steer clear of statements that might be controversial – unless you want to be at the center of the storm. Off the cuff remarks can have a massive ripple effect to be managed your staff, PR team and others tied to the issue after the fact. Pause for a moment in private before you go public.

Despite the inherent risks embrace your humanity.

Words of caution don’t mean you can’t let your personality shine through. In fact, this is one of the best ways CEOs can engage on a deeper, more human level with stakeholders. Personal insights into what it’s like to lead an organization show authenticity. Just remember that there are limits to what’s appropriate to share.

Any leader looking to engage through social media can harness the power, or suffer from the peril, of the medium. While it provides a forum for new interaction, new communications policies have similarities to traditional media guidelines.

Keeping that in mind will help you participate in ways that adds value, not headaches, to your organization.

  A few comments on things that caught my eye while I took some time off this past week.

1. Today’s New York Times has an opinion piece by well-known pollster Stanley Greenberg on the state of affairs in Washington DC. As he is describing the problem with Democrats, he says, “They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.”  The same goes for corporate reputation. If a company is considered disreputable by consumers, its voters so to speak, no one will listen to them, recommend them or buy their products. Disreputable can be a killer app.

2. Discouraging to see that the world’s top 10 best-selling business books, as noted on Amazon over the past three months, are all authored by men with the exception of Suze Orman. Makes me worry more about the reputation of female business book authors and worry less about the reputation of male business book authors. As an author of two business books on reputation, I found this factoid disturbing although not surprising.  When I looked at the best sellers on business and investing for the past month in the US alone, New York Times’ business writer Gretchen Morgenson’s book Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon was among the top 10 with the other 9 authors not surprisingly being men. So maybe it’s the 10% rule for female business writers. I guess we’ll take what we can get.

3. Data deluge. An article on data overload made me wince since I think about it a lot, especially all the information I try to process every day (even on vacation) with regard to “reputation.”  I keep asking myself how a company can build its reputation when there is so much data and everyone feels overwhelmed by all the additional work they’ve taken on as the recession slowly creeps along? What can a company do to set itself apart and convey to stakeholders that there is something new to be heard? How long does it take for reputations to turn over, to go from bad to good, good to great and great to the best? These are questions that I am keeping on my list of topics to explore. If you have an inkling, let me know. I do know one or two things — what you say about your corporate reputation must be simple, memorable, transmissable and distinctive. And I guess I could add relevant. And maybe “social.”

4. If you have not read The Checklist Manifesto written by Atul Gawande, it is worth reading. (I realize he is a male business book author!) I am now a bigger believer in Checklists than I was before. One of the best take-aways was the importance of  preventing communications failures when dealing with complexity. In fact, it is so important that it has to be added to the critical steps of a checklist. In recent months, I have learned more about how hospitals operate and the importance of introducing oneself. At first, I thought this “Hello, I am ___”) was a curious thing because in business, we hand over business cards and explain what we do all the time. But in extremely complex, life-altering situations such as flying a plane, operating on a patient or building a building that stays up,  it makes a tremendous difference to establish communications by introducing oneself by name and title and acknowledging the other members of the team. As Gawande says, it is important to “ensure stupid stuff isn’t missed (antibiotics, allergies, the wrong patient) and a few communications checks to ensure people work as a team to recognize the many other potential traps and subtleties.” Since so much of business today is built on specialties and not just general know-how, business reputations can come down to something as simple as communications and introductions and getting everyone on the same page. Definitely worth my time.

I was lucky enough to attend the Arthur W. Page Society meeting a few weeks ago and hear some thought-producing  speakers on reputational issues in a complex world. I believe I promised in my last blog post that I would write more about the 10 lessons learned from the global corporate communications officer at Toyota, Jim Wisemen.  One of the statements he made which deeply resonated with me was how he used to think that he was among the top corporate crisis counselors – pre-recall, that is.  He candidly and I must say very humbly said that he learned once the crisis began that he had a thing or two to learn about crisis in today’s world.  Wisemen said that when the recall began, they were receiving 500 calls a day from the media! And although they had a 1-800 number for customers to call regarding the recalls and that they had been used to getting 3,000 calls daily on average, that figure jumped to 100,000 per day when the recall began.  And this 800 number had only been programmed to manage 15,000 per day.  Imagine managing in this type of reputation-on-fire environment.  So here are the 10 lessons he gave to the audience of senior corporate communications officers at the meeting. Worth keeping in a safe place to pull out when the fire bell rings at your company. His lessons are good guides to our collective futures. Thank you to Jim for sharing with us.

1. Listen to customers
2. Communicate internally, fast and frequently
3. The new media breeds hysteria, deal with it
4. Get help from friends
5. Understand the politics and fight back
6. Swallow pride and communicate with legal (you are now joined at the hip)
7. Educate the media (consider informing reporters on automotive issues beforehand such as safety)
8. Emphasize social media
9. Stay true to your principles (The Toyota Way)
10. Don’t let it ruin your life –try not to take it personally

  A survey on irritating buzzwords was forwarded to me last week and I was delighted that “online reputation management” was not among them although it made me wonder. In my narrow world, online reputation management seems to be ubiquitous and I use it alot. The last thing I would want to be called is bothersome. However, the analysis by an independent research group for The Creative Group looked at the” most annoying” industry buzzwords according to marketing and advertising executives. As you can only imagine, “social media” and “social networking” are at the top. I have to admit that I have used some of these words myself so I am not a complete innocent. However, I am now forewarned.

I noticed that 24/7 was mentioned (number 20) which made me recall the New York Times Public Editor’s article from yesterday that cited the paper’s dot com site’s assistant managing editor Jim Roberts who calls it the 1440/7 news cycle because there are  1,440 minutes every day, seven days a week with ”each one of those minutes demanding news for delivery to a networked world.”  I think that Jim Roberts has it exactly right when it comes to filling the news demand.

25 Most Annoying Marketing Buzzwords

1. “Social media/social networking”
2. “Synergy”
3. “Free”
4. “Innovative/innovation”
5. “ROI/return on investment”
6. “Extra value/value added”
7. “Model(s)”
8. “Telemarketing”
9. “Social media expert”
10. “Resolve”
11. “Moving forward”
12. “Branding”
13. “Multitasking”
14. “Going green”
15. “Proactive”
16. “Think out of the box”
17. “Culture change”
18. “End of the day”
19. “Interactive”
20. “24/7″
21. “Integrated/integration”
22. “Viral”
23. “The big idea”
24. “Leverage”
25. “Unique”

I just posted to the HBR blog site on how Qantas‘ reputation is suffering reputation darts instead of pats on the head after the double-decker’s engine explosion last week and the pilot’s safe landing with 466 people on board. Why is Qantas’ reputation being challenged when headlines about its pilot’s (AKA Captain Marvel) heroic emergency landing should be dominating?  Read my thoughts on how social media is changing reputation perceptions and if you are wondering the same thing.

  We released a new study today on the social-ability of CEOs (see link below for executive summary).  As the worlds of traditional and social media collide and vast technological change is upon us, we decided to ask whether those at the top are minding their social reputations as well as their corporate reputations.  In a way, they are one and the same since reputation is my middle name and I dutifully follow CEO reputations, we decided to explore more deeply.

How social are those chief executives at the top of the revenue pyramid? We found that the majority of CEOs from the world’s largest companies—64 percent—are not social, that is, they are not publicly, visibly engaging online with external stakeholders.  Now they probably engage internally with employees using social media (their intranet, blogs possibly, web casts) but that is hardly easy to research.  Our research undertaking was daunting enough. 

It took us nearly a year to complete the research when all was said and done. In the process, we learned why there are mostly anecdotes out there about CEOs’ use of social media.  Some CEOs have common names resulting in either extensive digging or there are simply too many matches to determine which is correct (e.g., John Watson of Chevron or Mike Duke of Walmart). CEOs turnover is high which means that tenure dates must be closely regarded for each search.  CEO and company names can vary in spelling, requiring all variations to be checked (e.g., IBM is found as IBM, I.B.M. and International Business Machines). Search engines are inefficient as a research tool as it pulls in too many results to sift through which requires investigating each CEO one by one. Web sites are rarely comprehensive and archives are short-lived. Each web site is unique requiring tailored searches (e.g., one web site may have speeches archived with the press releases in the media section and another may have speeches archived with the CEO’s biography).  Would be wonderful if there was a commonly recognized way to organize corporate web sites.

We audited the online communications (as well as traditional activities and coverage) of 60 CEOs of the top 50 global Fortune 500 companies. Some companies had two CEOs in one year which is why we ended up with 60, not 50. We also looked back as best we could to 2007 for comparisons. You can find the results at “Socializing Your CEO: From (Un)Social to Social.”

Here are some stats:

• 97% of CEOs communicated either through traditional or online channels
• Only 36% of CEO are engaged through their corporate web sites or in social media
• Most popular CEO online communications activity is posted letters or messages on company web sites – at 28%
• 18% use video/podcasts on their company website or company YouTube channel (there has been a near doubling of company YouTube channels from 2007 to 2009 (34% to 56%) and yet it is vastly under-utilized for featuring CEOs.
• Few partake in Twitter (8%), Facebook (4%), MySpace (4%) or LinkedIn (4%)

Tomorrow I will write more about some other interesting findings.  The good news is that CEOs are extensively quoted in the business press and busy on the conference and business school circuit (93%). But CEOs are not yet fully socialized, often with good reason and sometimes not.

[Interestingly, when I went to Google Images and Bing to find a pix for this post, I did not have much to choose from when looking for "CEOs online."]

   Attended an interesting roundtable yesterday hosted by Business Marketing Association and Forbes. The topic was managing reputation in the new world of the Internet. Some interesting points surfaced:

• It is easier now to track reputation and ROI with the Internet. However the field of social media is so new that it is very difficult to track back to a baseline.

• Marketers are now interested in reputation as they realize that the company behind the brand matters. CMOs are the new entry point into companies as they see the connection more vividly. Product marketing is not enough.

• Perception is nice to have but behavior is have to have. You need your customers to act – buy your products, give you the benefit of the doubt in time of crisis, recommend you to others, spread word-of-mouth.

• Social media is the new Petri dish.

• Reputation Institute’s Anthony Johndrow reported on a study among CMOs and CCOs. They found that 97% are interested in reputation, 89% are doing something in the space but only 33% are measuring its impact. Disturbing when companies spend so much on reputation in general.

• We should be referring to “social business” not “social media.”

• Integration between traditional and social is key.

• One of the reasons more companies become social is that competitors force their hands. When a competitor starts using Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, its rivals are propelled into this new world.

• Sometimes your critics can be your best advocates. An example was given of a relentless critic who also links to company articles mentioned on Twitter that promote the company’s point of view. So your online enemies can also get your word out if you just time it right.

Everyone agreed that reputation has become more complex, harder to manage and everyone’s job. In addition, the bar is now not as high or as low as it was just one year ago. Since so many companies are now using Twitter for engaging customers and neutralizing reputation damage, some of the early examples such as Dell and Comcast are just that – text book examples and expected today.

CEO visibility is a double edged sword. You can decline conference invitations, be selective about the ones you speak at or accept them all. For CEOs, external communications including conferences, interviews, industry events, seminars, etc. all carry some sort of risk . Today the audience can boo you via Twitter, blog poor reviews or erroneously extrapolate a sentence out of context and then accuse you of being a CEO celebrity (the worst offense ever these days). On the up side, CEOs can speak at conferences, network with others and get the company’s story told before a receptive and interested audience. In the many years that I have been advising CEOs and commenting on their behavior, I’ve always thought that speaking up and out is beneficial to employees, customers, the industry and the overall reputation of this select executive class (which needs mending). Today, more than ever, executive conferencing should be strategic, smart and as my friend Carol says, “advance the business.”

Weber Shandwick just released its new analysis on CEO and C-level participation at executive conferences. We compared the past year with 2007’s results on where All-Star CEOs (from Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies survey) took to the podium. Here are some of the key results. For more detail, check out the press release from our Voiceboxx team.

• CEO participation at top global forums increased 96% from 2007 among the top 50 world’s most admired companies. The increase in the 2009 CEO speaking circuit roster was most probably the result of more CEO speakers from the financial sector and more CEOs who saw their rivals on stage and decided to “if you can’t beat them, join them.”
• Other C-level executives (CMOs, CFOs, CIO/CTOs) increased their participation by 40% from 2007. The Five-Star Events at which All-Star CEOs have been the most likely to speak in 2009 were (in rank order): Clinton Global Initiative, Chief Executives’ Club of Boston, the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, the World Economic Forum, Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) Board of Boards, and the Detroit Economic Club’s National Summit.
• Top events for other C-level executives included (in rank order): FT (Financial Times) Innovate, Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology CFO Summit, Conference Board’s Marketing Conference and the Milken Institute’s Global Conference. For C-suite executives in good times and bad, innovation and technology are attractive platforms for companies to position themselves competitively, to listen to trends and to interact personally with customers and prospects.

Some insights from the analysis are:

1. Despite this past year’s tough economy, heightened executive scrutiny and limited budgets, top level conferences continue to attract executives from the most respected organizations in the world. Businesses are clearly hungry for channels to network with customers and communicate their points of view. Our results highlight how many of the world’s most admired company leaders selected speaking platforms in 2009 to demonstrate leadership strength and competitive differentiation.
2. For the most part, a fair number of the most admired company CEOs did not shy away from the spotlight but instead participated in conferences that required their insights and ideas in economic problem-solving, corporate responsibility and innovative business practices. This class of respected CEOs appeared to understand that speaking up was one way of being part of the solution rather than the problem derailing the world economy. Some of these leading CEOs clearly decided to participate in the reinvention of business and help drive renewed prosperity. This is a good thing and we expect no less.

Quite the week on many counts. For one, I was quoted in the WSJ on the Tiger Woods crisis. The best part about being quoted besides seeing what the writer ends up taking from your conversation and how it fits into the piece is the time spent on thinking about the question you are likely to be asked. I would say that most times, I can never tell what will be quoted after a 20 minute conversation. I knew that the writer would have to start out wiht the crisis lesson 101 that everyone has been talking about which is to get out in front of the news. So I did not feel required to say that. Anyhow, we covered many topics and she quoted me about sometimes ignoring your counsellors and following what your core values say are important (that of the company).  The question was what lessons does the Tiger Woods crisis provide for companies?  And there are plenty. My friend Joy Sever, another reputation expert, sent me this excerpt in our late night exchange on the topic from Bill Moyers’ interview with author Jeanette Winterson about heroes. Thought it was worth repeating here.

BILL MOYERS: What intrigues me about the Greek gods, Romans too, is that they do great deeds. But also they get drunk, and as you say, they womanize, they lie, they negotiate with the Gods of the underworld. It’s true, isn’t it, that if you find the hero in mythology, you also discover the monster?

JEANETTE WINTERSON: Always, yes. The thing is double faced. It’s as though these people are hinged in the center, and that the good and the bad have folded back, touching each other in each person. But you know, that’s what so strikingly true, isn’t it, about the human condition? That we’re not one or the other, or very rarely. Often, the people who do achieve great things, are also people who have fatal flaws. All heroes have fatal flaws as well as reprehensible conduct. … when you read the hero myths, the things that brings them down are always very trivial. It’s always the thing in themselves that they can’t control. And there is also a truth about the hero, that they can never be killed, or destroyed by anything simply from the outside. They have somewhere to collude in their own death or destruction.

Then I got an email mid-week from Del Jones at USA Today on second generation CEOs. He was writing about the Comcast acquisition of GE’s NBC Universal and the prospects for CEO Brian Roberts. I’ve always had a special interest in family businesses because it seems that my entire extended family was involved in one for ever and a day. It’s what got me so interested in business in the first place. So when asked about my thoughts on Roberts, I remembered the saying that I heard from my dad which was that the first generation starts a business, the second generation runs it, and the third generation ruins it. That’s the quote he used in the article .  In retrospect, it was the right thing for me to say although at the time I was not so sure.

In both articles this week, I was the closer. I wonder what that means.

     The Economist’s The World in 2010 is out. I spent time reading it over the Thanksgiving holiday. The articles range from President Obama to Chinese workers to the FIFA World Cup to the swine-flu to museums to Shakira to the crisis in human genetics to e-readers. It has something for everyone. There were many insightful ideas but the one that I particularly liked was by the fairly new CEO of Yahoo! Carol Bartz. Her topic was Leadership in the Information Age which she knows a lot about as the head of one of the world’s largest information resources.

When it comes to CEOs, Bartz mentioned how unsettling it can be to learn how new employees know everything about you on their first day. They have scoured the Internet, read your speeches, seen your interviews and picked up all the gossip they will ever need to have a good conversation about your reputation in the cafeteria or online. She writes, “At some companies, insider information can barely be said to exist.”

She also says, and I totally agree, that one remark that is out of context or a slight misstatement can be debilitating to new CEOs.  Reputations can be damaged over less than Twitter’s 140 characters. Old CEOs as well.  Bartz writes: “Public companies in particular are so besieged by 24-hour commentary and instant opinion that many managers find themselves paralyzed.” After the long holiday weekend with Tiger Woods in the news 24/7 for his early morning car accident, I have to say that the commentariat have been very busy. But back to Bartz. She discusses in the article how hard it is to lead when everyone is second-guessing you and the competition is helping to feed the frenzy on how unfit leadership is. It is a high stakes game today.

How are leaders expected to lead when they are on stage for everyone to throw tomatoes or applaud madly? Bartz suggests that the old model of command and control is obsolete. Leaders have to change direction and be able to explain this new world order to those around them. To make that happen, she suggests listening carefully to employees. Leading from the bottom up. Second, she recommends finding the thought leaders within your organization. Why? Bartz says: “But equally pressing is finding those employees who, though perhaps not the best managers, have the ability to digest and interpret information for others. Grooming these in-house ideas people helps foster a culture of openness to fresh thinking—the greatest energy an organization can have.” Leaders need to lead by ideas, not by force of power. Products and services alone are not enough.

The CEOs of the next decade will need to take information from wherever they may find them. Inside. Outside. Inside out. One thing is for sure. They won’t find what they need to compete successfully at HQ. They need to be outside their corner offices and starting conversations with all types of people. As I see it, leadership will be all about making sense of this brave new world. Let’s call it sense-making leadership for 2010. That’s what will make CEO reputations worthy this time around.