(Un)Social CEO

If you regularly read my blog and know our work on Socializing Your CEO, you know that I follow social CEOs or other executives. Well, this story was not what I was thinking about when we first starting calling for more CEOs to use online technology.

An article on how CIOs need to get a seat at the table and boost their reputational status within the organization appeared in the WSJ this week. I read it on a plane but left myself a message to post about it  (are CIOs really second-class citizens in the C-suite?).  I am always interested in who is sitting at the table with the CEO and have over the years been particularly interested in the role of CCOs — Chief Communications Officers — and how they are increasingly sitting at that table as crises soar and reputations tumble. So naturally, this drew my attention. 

 As I went to find the article online, I stumbled upon another WSJ blog post about the article which had this quote or two from Brian Halligan, chief executive of Hubspot, who spoke at a panel by MIT’s CIO Symposium on the role of the CIO:

 ”Mr. Halligan also said CIOs are the logical choice to help chief executives master new communication tools like blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Many chief executives are either uncomfortable using those media, or hire professionals to stand in for them: Either way, their audiences can sense the lack of spontaneity. CIOs can help their CEOs “have a more authentic relationship with the market and vendors,” he said.

Since I have been carefully monitoring how CEOs become more social, I admit that I had not thought about this in the same way. In my world of communications, I think that CCOs are the natural teacher for showing CEOs how to use social media and video to communicate deep within the organization and to customers and other important stakeholders. I liked Halligan’s statement about how being more social might change perceptions of CEOs as stodgy, risk-adverse and uncommunicative. He is probably right.

Related to this topic, it is probably not a good idea to hire professionals to stand in for CEOs although I don’t doubt that it is done. CEO voices are hard to imitate and employees should be fairly adept at noticing counterfeit CEO-speak. So I would advise that if you are getting your CEO to blog (it does not have to be too often as we advise in our research) to get to know people and let them get to know the CEO, get them to do it themselves.

Thought this was a good example of a social CEO – building reputation at the top through social media. Love the fact that he is holding these teleconference chats with season-ticket holders. I do not know much about football but he has the right idea.

“Giants’ Fans Next On Goodell’s Call ListIt’s been a few years since Roger Goodell was an NFL intern answering fan mail, but the league says the idea behind the commissioner’s chats with season-ticket holders is the same: communication. Goodell will host an interactive teleconference for Giants’ season-ticket holders Wednesday, the fourth such call he’s held in the past two weeks. As the NFL lockout drags into its second month, the league office is responding to requests by individual teams (the Dolphins, Browns and Chargers have already enlisted the commissioner; the 49ers and Broncos have their calls to come) to make Goodell available. ‘The commissioner enjoys communicating with fans,” league spokesman Greg Aiello said. “He wants to know what is on their minds.’”

Since we at Weber Shandwick did that analysis on socializing CEOs and how to turn CEOs from (UN)social to social, I’ve been fascinated by the increasing examples that are popping up. In the December issue of HBR, there is a very good piece on Best Buy CEO’s Brian Dunn and his experience in the digital space. The article starts out with an attention-getting example of how someone hijacked his Twitter handle and wrote “I’ve been having a lot of great sex lately, and here’s why.” The link attached to it was for a Viaga-like pill. (Lesson Learned: Regularly change your password)

Dunn explains his sticking with social media and the many benefits. Here are a few reasons he enjoys being a social CEO.

• Provides the opportunity to interact directly with customers and employees
• Provides insights into trends and news
• It is not just a trend or fad that will fade away
• Lets people know what the CEO is thinking about (from store visits or customers he meets)

Then he says it all: “I like how posting about these things allows us all to be humanized a little bit.”  Being social, even for a limited amount of time or on one platform such as Facebook, gives CEOs or other executives some personality and humanity.

Like everything new, it is easier to find reasons not to. But there are many reasons to join the digital conversation, if only to  insure that you and your company are in the conversation and where your customers are hanging out. I agree it is not for every CEO but wade in and give it a try.

  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."]