Tag: businesses and social media

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It Ain’t No Hula Hoop: Social Media & Proactive Leadership

Sometimes leadership is about the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff, the fads from the trends, the reality from delusion.

Leaders must have the ability to know when a fad will become a trend and when a trend will become a direction. They must be able to avoid foibles while not losing opportunities. Years ago the sociologist Sorokin pointed out the essentials and dangers of current fads and foibles.

Every so often leaders lose an opportunity when they fail to see when a fad is a trend and not a foible.

Just look at when IBM failed to keep in-step with Apple’s visionary goals. As people in my generation learned, Apple wasn’t just pushing a Hula Hope craze or a Davy Crockett hat fad–they were paving a new direction–the PC.

Similarly, social media isn’t simply a fad–it’s a movement that’s creating fresh interactions, information structures, cultures, and products. And, at its core, social media is reinterpreting social time and space.

I’ve been asked: why? Why, discuss social media when you’re focused on writing about becoming proactive, the skills of execution, and getting things done?

The answer’s easy: I believe social media is a new capacity for narrative that is interpreted through bits of information, imagery, quick observations, fashion, tonality, and a new shorthand language. It will be essential for any leader to understand. It’s crucial that organization realize the implications of social media.

This summer I’ve been spending a great deal of time trying to understand the implications of social media–not for the future, but for tomorrow morning.  It may seem dramatic, but it does strike me that the immediate challenge is to appreciate social media as a energy that has to be harnessed. This isn’t something that’s happening–it’s something that’s already happened.

Part of the luxury of being around for so long is that I know when I see Hula Hoops–and this ain’t no Hula Hoop.

The following video will give you a sense of social media’s massive and rapid implications.

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BLG Leadership Insights Leadership On the Edge Leadership Videos

Getting Out There: Organizations & Social Media Campaigns

For several weeks I’ve argued that social media is a critical tool for making organizations proactive. However, he haven’t talked about HOW to implement social media into your organization. Try to remember the following:

When a business uses social media the ultimate goal is to create a honest relationship with customers. Social media should:

1. State your company’s objective, purpose, mission.

2. Communicate your company’s corporate culture.

3. Maintain long term connections with clients and other businesses.

Here’s a video explaining it all, in ‘plain English’:

However, it’s not as easy as it looks and it isn’t something that happens over night or with a Twitter account.

Industry experts agree that a business trying to create a social media initiative should usually follow these three steps:

1. Seed Your Brand: Get your company active on the big social media sites (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.)

2. Create a Social Media Policy: Make sure everyone who does contribute to your company’s social media platforms do so within a set of guidelines in order to avoid future problems. Here’s a great example of one.

3. Perfect Your Blog: Make sure your blog is up to date and always fresh. Make sure it continually communicates your company’s image, thoughts, and culture.

Again, it’s looks pretty straight forward and ‘easy’. But try telling that to the many businesses that have chucked in the towel after their blog, Twitter, and Facebook page produced little in the way of tangible results. However, social media doesn’t guarantee sales, but rather it creates an effortless way to make long lasting bonds with your community and consumer base. It’s about building friendships–not sales plans.

How Can Social Media Fail? (…especially if it’s pretty user-friendly?)

The biggest challenge businesses face when it comes to social media initiatives is: “communicating corporate culture”. In other words, businesses have trouble being honest with their audience….

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