Social Media and the CEO: What Has Their Attention

Social media and workplace technology is important, but for CEO’s customer engagement using technology wins every time.  This is because there is an evident ROI attached to engagement with the customer.  The sales are apparent and evident while the ROI of workplace collaboration or social media programs are not so black and white.  This is the fundamental challenge getting the C-Suite on board with social media and technology use by employees.  There is no guarantee, it’s difficult to measure, and correlations are never certain no matter how much big data or figures you extract.

Engaged Employees & Customers Are Driven by Social Media

The prevailing belief in the study is that HR isn’t part of the social collaboration study.  It is a point I wholeheartedly disagree.  I think this belief demonstrates the gap between CEO and HR in understanding how involved and vested HR is in human capital.  While many of HR’s duties are administative, technology is changing the position.  Human Resource leaders will have to push sitting down with organizational leaders to help drive their involvement in social media engagement, employer branding and internal collabroation at work.

CEO’s are focused on talking to customers not employees when it comes external social media.  They are focused on being engaged with social media in customer focused place.  It’s likely another reason why HR isn’t involved in the conversation.

Your Work Determines Your Personal Worth

One of the key points I took away from the IBM study (download your copy here) is “work is becoming an of personal value.”  In my opinion they are half right.  Work is important except that it isn’t becoming a personal value it is already here.  The recession has shown me this as I watched many amazing friends and family members become depressed feeling worthless simply because they were unemployed.  Work is a part of who we are.  It’s already here.  We as the individual choose how much worth we place on work in determining our peresonal worth.  Other important take aways from the study include:

• More than 70 percent of CEO’s see human capital as a primary way to sustain market share and organizational growth. The focus is on the people.  Creating a recognition culture and organizational openness by using social media and HR technologies can move us forward.

• Social media is not an organizational attribute that CEO’s consider to engage employees.  It is a channel to point, engage, and monitor the conversation.  CEO’s don’t really care about social media.  It is a means to and end and should be communicated as such to senior leaders and C-Suite executives.

• Fifty-two percent of the CEOs said they intend to make significant changes to their organizations to improve internal collaboration.  This bodes well for internal collaboration tools like Yammer, Jive, Telligent, IBM Connections, and Chatter.  (View my recent infographic by clicking here.)

• Sixteen percent of CEO’s currently use social media to engage with the customer.  This same group expects the number to 57 percent in the next 3-5 years.  Interestingly enough they believe face to face interaction of the sales variety will decrease from 80 percent to 67 percent.  Could social media and virtual meeting technologies fill the gaps in this decline?