Posts Tagged ‘social media’

One of the ways I try to tap into trends is to keep a mental note of requests from clients, colleagues and the media. At first, I may not notice that something is bubbling up but by the third time, I begin to scratch my head and wonder if something is up. Then I mull it over, ask a few people and try to decide if the trend is at all noteworthy and worth mentioning.

Lately I have been thinking about CEO visibility. Since I have been following CEOs for what seems like forever and witnessed the pre-Enron, post-Enron, pre-financial tsunami and now mid-financial tsunami, I think that we are starting to see CEOs emerge from the shadows once again.  As our recent research showed, few people have positive perceptions of CEOs in general (14%) but when it comes to their own CEOs, positive perceptions are sky high (86%). Thus CEOs seem to be getting the message that they need to speak up on behalf of their industries and their own companies. Over the past two months, we have increasingly been asked more about how CEOs can get their messages out in this kaleidoscope of news. CEO conferences never went away but many were scaled down as the economy took its toll and public scrutiny intensified over how CEOs were spending their time, where they were going and how they traveled from one place to another. What we are now seeing is that CEOs are more willing to speak at conferences that drive their messages and sales home. Whereas it is often hard to control the message in the media, it is easier to manage the message at a conference.  With the advent of social media, Twitter and all things digital, CEO conference keynotes, panel discussions and Q&A are easier than ever to circulate to wide audiences instanteously. My sense is that executive conferences are poised for a major comeback.

To say the least, the article in yesterday’s New York Times on blogging made me wince.

“According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.” 

I obviously fit into the 5% that keep blogging (or sticks to their knitting). Is there something wrong with me?  What distinguishes this 5%? When I finished my dissertation many years ago, I realized that there were many fellow students who never completed the degree. I thought to myself then that there must be something wrong with me for toiling all those years  when others just made the decision to move on. I guess I don’t move on well.

Back to my blog, two interesting tidbits for my posting this evening. 

First, I read that the pre-presidential Obama administration asked the following of applicants: “If you have ever sent an…email, text message or instant message…that could…be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family or the President-elect if it were made public, please describe.”  We should all be adding similar questions to our employment applications. Social media is key to reputation-building and reputation-busting whether you are in public or private business. [This appeared in the Economist, April 18th, 2009 and cannot find the article.]

The second item I saved recently has to do with the CEO of online shoe store Zappos.  CEO Tony Hsieh is the new Jeff Bezos.  You may have heard this story if you follow social media tales among the executive set like I do.  Hsieh’s Twitters are now quite famous and the company receives extraordinarily high marks in terms of its reputation for extreme customer service (“deliver WOW through service”).  What I particularly like is this story about Hsieh’s team focus.  Since talent is so important, recruiting at Zappos is heightened.  Imagine this. Hsieh offers new employees $2,000 to quit their call center trainee jobs in order to weed out those who won’t make the grade.  As reported, three people took the money and ran last year.

    I recently Twittered about this survey since I thought it had some excellent information. The research comes from Deloitte LLP and is their 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey. The topic this year was social networking and reputational risk in the workplace. Timely.  Since we conducted our survey on how executives manage their reputations online, Deloitte’s survey added some nuances that we did not cover. Deloitte had Opinion Research survey 2000+ employees and 500 executives in the U.S.  Here are some of the more interesting facts that caught my eye.

Employees

• 74% of employees believe that it is easy to damage a corporate reputation through social media (That’s high awareness for sure)
• 24% say they don’t know if their company has a social media policy and 11% say their company has one but they don’t know what it is about.
• 49% say that they would not change their online behavior if their company had a corporate social media policy (the survey also found that 29% of employees were being a bit more careful about what  they did online in insure that they kept their jobs in these tough economic times)
• Somewhat more than one third said that they rarely or never think about their boss, colleagues or clients when participating online (I’d call that risky)
• 26% say that their company does not allow them on certain social networking sites during work hours (I hear that often when traveling in Europe and was initially surprised. But there seems to be a large enough portion of the workforce that has no access to certain of these sites.)

Executives

• Only 15% of executives are addressing risks from social media at the board level
• Only 17% say that their companies have management systems in place to identify online social media risks (Not good news)
• Only 22% say that their company has formal social media policies and guidelines in place for employees (This is increasingly important as the FTC becomes more involved with social media and begins thinking about changing rules.)
• 67% of executives say that their company does not discuss how to use social media to leverage their strengths or mitigate risks (That’s an awfully high percentage. This is risky in itself!)

Since I joined the communications field, I have always been fascinated by the intellectually stimulating and wide variety of activities that comprise communications officers’ jobs. At first, I encountered “you are in the pr field?” when I told people that I left publishing for public relations. I used to oversee public relations as part of my previous job as Marketing & Communications Director at Fortune. Perhaps I have been luckier than most but the field suits me fine because of its expertise in shaping corporate and CEO reputations. Therefore it should come as no surprise that I am very interested in examining the reputation of the corporate communications professional today. As I saw presidential strategists’ David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs shape candidate Obama’s daily messages and actions, I knew that the CCO job might finally be recognized as critical in a 24/7 always open always on marketplace.

Last year we partnered with executive search firm Spencer Stuart on researching the changing role of the CCO (Corporate Communications Officer). Now we are in year two, a more challenging year. What did we learn about the CCO’s job, reputation and responsibilities?  In a time of unprecedented economic volatility, global CCOs have actually seen their “stock” rise over the past 12 months. Just what I predicted. In The Rising CCO, conducted with KRC Research, 58% of global Fortune 500 CCOs now report to the CEO, compared to 48% a year ago. That is a large increase. Not only do more CCOs call the CEO their boss, but 40% of CCOs consider the CEO to be their biggest ally in the organization. This leadership momentum coincides with an increase in CCO tenure: in 2008, CCOs’ average tenure was 65 months, compared to 54 months in 2007. By comparison, the average tenure of chief marketing officers is 28 months, according to research conducted separately by Spencer Stuart. The CCO is definitely on the rise and a greater asset than ever during these critical times.

We also found that experience in crisis communications and issues management is critical to a CCO’s success. It was not always the case when the marketplace was plentiful and everything seemed to be pointed upwards. According to CCOs surveyed, the need for crisis/issues management experience increased 45% since 2007. Additionally, and importantly, CCOs cite social media/blogging as the most frequently added function to their corporate communications departments in 2008, and they believe that social media/blogging will be their most important tool in 2009.

As corporate reputation—anticipated to be the number one communications priority in 2009—endures extreme stress and the Internet provides unanticipated opportunities and risks, skills often “owned” by the CCO are in greater demand: crisis and issues management, social media monitoring and online engagement, reputation management, and management of a complex portfolio of stakeholders such as employees, investors, nongovernmental organizations and trade media.

It goes without saying that CEOs and boards are under tremendous pressure to navigate through the stormy seas of the current economic tsunami. Like never before, CEOs are depending on CCOs for crisis and issues counsel to steady their company reputations and calm stakeholders.  

Traveling requires a bit of adjusting when I return home. I was in LA and Dallas last week and then returned home to find my laptop not working properly on Sunday. I know….never work on Sundays. Therefore I was locked out of writing my blog and here it is already Wednesday without me having posted anything until now. Travel can be very disruptive despite the well-neededflight time where you get some time to read and think.  The passenger sitting next to me missed his flight to Berlin for business and that got me all anxious as we tried to figure out what the chances were that his connection would also be delayed.  Turns out he worked at HP in communications so we got to talking about PR. He missed his flight unhappily.

As usual, I was storehousing information on reputation and online reputation management which has occupied a lot of my time lately (the first three from The Economist where they had an insightful special report on the “rich.” The reputation of the financial services sector has certainly taken a big hit and am hoping to see signs of some renewal. But as the facts below convey, people are having a hard time believing everything they hear these days.  

• 63% of wealthy Americans have lost faith in financial services companies (Harrison Group)
• 64% of people living in Britain think that banks that have taken government funds should not allow executives to get any bonuses at all (Populus Poll)
• 70% of rich people took some of their money away from their financial advisors (Prince & Associates)
• Turning to social media…41% of companies say they have developed social media policies and guidelines (Paper presented to the 12th Annual International Public Relations Conference by Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson)
• Most intriguing and fun to learn was this… Hitwise, the social media metrics site, says that social media has taken over from pornography as the number one use of the Internet (Paper presented to the 12th Annual International Public Relations Conference by Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson)

All this brings me back to traveling. Yesterday I paid rapt attention to a book review in the Wall Street Journal by David Myers. The book by Winifred Gallagher, RAPT, provides strategies on living a focused life.  Ah yes. I felt calmer just reading the book review. But this is what has stuck in my mind since I read the review and hopefully the book (if I can focus long enough to get to Amazon.com).

“To preserve my own mind from electronic takeover, I spend an hour alone each afternoon, without a computer or phone, in a local coffee shop, and I ask my assistant to forward messages from my public email address only near the end of each day. I’ve noticed that I prefer long plane rides to shorter ones, thanks to the extra time for uninterrupted thinking or reading. A University of Michigan research team led by Marc Berman recently observed that students who took an hour-long walk in the serenity of the Ann Arbor Arboretum, rather than through downtown Ann Arbor, showed an increased capacity for attention.”

In an article from Tom Friedman today on Pirates and U.S. foreign policy, he said. “The issues we have with them look less like problems that can be solved and more like conditions that we have to manage.” This made me think about social media – not easily solved but you need to manage. This week I was talking to a company about the importance of online reputation management and the need to be prepared and understand how to use this media if your “Dell moment” arrives.  I do not think I made much headway because they felt safer being under the radar.  Companies might not be able to solve the countless ways that their reputations can be harmed online (think Dominos pizza) but they need to try to manage their online reputations because doing nothing or next to nothing is irresponsible. You’ve got to think of your employees, customers and investors. That’s my two cents.

By the way, participated in a new business meeting with my colleagues in LA. They are damm good!

The Conference Board Reputation Risk Research Working Group issued a new report on Reputation Risk. They concluded from the working group and a survey among 148 large company risk management executives that risk management needs to be better integrated into the enterprise risk management (ERM) function. Only about one-half (49%) highly integrate the two.  The report provides insights into how some companies are measuring reputation risk and new tools that deliver on this need. Reputation Institute and Evolve24 are both cited. One of the findings that parallels ours is that social media is gaining traction in the corner suite but many executives are overlooking its risks.  According to the Conference Board report, only 34% of respondents stated that they extensively monitor social networking sites and an even fewer 10% actively participate. As I have said, the good news is that executives are no longer asking their assistants to print out their emails to read but they still have far to go in terms of understanding the new media and making it work for their companies in identifying opportunity and yes, early warning signs.

www.webinknow.com on how the Air Force uses social media to manage their reputation. The web site owner David Scott had spoken to the head of emerging technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency – Captain David Faggard — in the Pentagon. Thanks to Scott for alerting me to this most interesting social media entrepreneur. Here is what he learned: