Mike de Block

The CEO’s of the future

The #1 priority for a CEO is to decide, which project deserves the time and resources in order to achieve the best ROI. At this moment a lot of projects are still devoted to increase the efficiency and thus create a better ROI. The reason why social media projects are not of primary importance, is because the current CEOs has 28 reasons to be afraid of social media. Fortunately, the number of CEOs who “gets social media” is growing and therefore allocating more resources to interact with the customer via social media platforms. 

Recently, I e-mailed with Robert Solleveld who is involved with the social media department of ING (link is in Dutch, but the reaction of ING at the bottom of the article is interesting) and asked him how he gained support for his projects, since the reality is that the CEOs has to be behind any project for it to receive the resources and commitment for it to ultimately succeed. He agreed that using the traditional ROI is hard and that the online customer feedback should be your primary focus to sustain the commitment and resources. In short, Robert’s answers shows close similarities with the ROI on social media (blocknotes 3), namely the return on ideas or even better the return on involvement.

Another good example is Greg Savage who is the CEO of Aquent ( a global recruitment company with nearly 70 offices worldwide). Greg is on twitter and has a blog to enhance his personal brand both off and online. Nevertheless, Greg is at this moment still in a minority as a social CEO, but this will change with a higher pace then you would expect.  

For the record, this is not an attack on all CEOs, since you can’t blame them as it’s just a difference in attitude around content, transparency, interaction. Future CEOs will use social media platforms to listen and identify their online brand lovers as their most important stakeholder. Since, It’s proven that loyalty to a brand is derived from the level of identification that a customer can have with an representative of a company (CEO??) and thus not with the brand. Being authentic is therefore key for future CEOs, but this shouldn’t be hard when the passion of the CEO for a brand equals the passion of his customer.

I was therefore triggered by a quote on  mashable from Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony. He said ““Eric Schmidt of Google is an infrequent Twitterer and is not a blogger; Steve Ballmer at Microsoft has no blog and no Twitter account; Michael Dell is on Twitter but is not an external blogger … Steve Jobs of Apple, and Larry Ellison of Oracle have no Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn , or blog presences that we could find.” Off course, you can say people like Steve Jobs, don’t need a social media presence, since he is Steve Jobs and Apple is Apple. Secondly, we love the mystique around people like Steve jobs, nevertheless they should be aware that there is very little margin between the likeability and dislike-ability of a personal brand. In short, we are in the middle of the process from having non-social CEOs to social CEOs like Greg.

As CEOs are valued as big personalities, people would love to tweet with them as long as they have trust/newsworthy tweets and ones in a whole a critical view on their own company/performance in which he can consult his followers. In short, the future CEO can use:

CoTweet as his personal crowdsourcing platform to consult his followers as partial employees

Foursquare to meet your followers for an offline consultation session and invite nearby peers to join as well.

Twitter to share the discussion and publish the outcomes of the discussion. In addition, identify over time the community leaders, which you can value as spokesperson of a certain segment of your target group. 

Hollrr to locate the innovators and early majority of your products, which you can value as your online pr agency.

43things to connect with new customers by assisting them in achieving their own personal goal.

Digg can be of use, since users on digg can choose the most newsworthy article posted by the users themselves. When you as a company appeal to them, a lot of free publicity can be generated via digg.

Tales of things to enable your existing customers to add their experience/story to the products you sell. Emotion is therefore included in the product, which makes it more appealing for new customers. Since it’s the story you tell and not the product you sell.

Facebook as a web shop, in which you let brand-lovers take control and hire them as “partial employees”. These brand-lovers will enable their friends to place widgets on their profile to spread the word of your company, but also earn a percentage on each endorsement that went via their profile. In short, use the social impact of your brand lovers to spread your message.

These platforms (and many more) can provide you with a new ideas for products and services based on the common input from your online brand-lovers or haters. However, when you are still wondering why a CEO should broaden his focus?  It’s because otherwise the loyalty of brands will decline and we all will live in a market full of niches (however, you could question whether this would be a negative development. Good topic for my next post;)). The CEOs of the future will therefore not solely focus on efficiency projects, but also decide which social project deserves his or her support. The scope of future CEOs will thus become larger, but far more interesting from my perspective. Mmm, maybe now it becomes a career move to consider ;)