Guest blog by Mark Fidelman, author of "Socialized!," on the importance of CIOs building a social media following internally and externally.
A guest blog by Mark Fidelman, excerpted from his new book, Socialized! How the Most Successful Businesses Harness the Power of Social (Bibliomotion).
Imagine a scenario five years from now in which two company directors are competing for the CIO position.
The first director has years of experience but lacks any social presence either internally or externally. She was “too busy” to deal with social networking or building an internal following. The second director, although less experienced, has taken the time to build an internal following. Whenever he communicates on the organization’s internal social platform, thousands of people read and respond to his messages. Externally, he has built a huge following on Twitter and Google+. He regularly puts out content that is considered valuable to the company’s customers and partners. In fact, he has attained a thought leader status in the industry. Which director do you think the company will promote?
For me, the answer is obvious. The director who has taken the time to build a community around himself will be more influential and will be able to more easily accomplish his objectives both inside and outside the organization. His large networks will wield tremendous power, collective intelligence, and the ability to influence both employees and customers. In effect, his ability to obtain a large following demonstrates his ability to be an effective leader.
| "The [executive] who has taken the time to build a community around himself will be more influential and will be able to more easily accomplish his objectives." |
Since late 2010, executive resistance to being more social has decled as executives start to see real results from their own efforts or from the efforts of their peers. A case in point is SAP’s CIO, Oliver Bussmann, who, incidentally, in 2012 was the most social CIO in the Fortune 250. In 2009, to demonstrate the effectiveness of being more social, he cited an internal scoring system similar to Net Promoter that was used to rate the effectiveness of his department. The IT Department received a score of 4 out of 10. At the end of 2011, that same score skyrocketed to 7.3. It happened because he used social technologies to adapt the IT department to the needs of the company.
Almost 80 percent of the executives we interviewed who had some engagement in social media told us that it added to both their own personal brand and, more importantly, to the organization’s. Only 30 percent of the executives told us that they had any internal followers, citing the lack of a robust social platform as the primary reason. But more than 60 percent of them believed that participating in social networks both internally and externally would improve their effectiveness as leaders.
I believe that ignoring the social trend is equivalent to career suicide. I’ll take it a step further and predict that executives will become unemployable (as executives) if they don’t have a social presence. There will simply be too many other executive contenders with larger, more influential markets. Sure, there will always be exceptions – monopolies, law enforcement, and government officials may not need to become social anytime soon. But for those in positions where communication and influence are key ingredients to success, having a large network will be a significant advantage and eventually an executive requirement.
What do you think? Have you developed your social network inside the organization and out? Do you believe going social will become essential to your career, or is it just a bunch of hype?
Mark Fidelman is CEO of Evolve! Capital and author of the book Socialized! How the Most Successful Businesses Harness the Power of Social. He also is Conference Director for the pre-eminent BusinessNext Social conference in Las Vegas, January 6-8, 2013
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