Social Media skills every leader needs

Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organizations have been responding to that new reality, realizing the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life: wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects; internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing; sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty; next-generation products are codeveloped in open-innovation processes; and corporate social media marketing jobs leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy. This radical change has created a dilemma for senior executives: while the potential of social media seems immense, the inherent risks create uncertainty and unease. By nature unbridled, these new communications media can let internal and privileged information suddenly go public virally. What’s more, there’s a mismatch between the logic of participatory media and the still-reigning 20th-century model of management and organizations, with its emphasis on linear processes and control. Social media encourages horizontal collaboration and unscripted conversations that travel in random paths across management hierarchies. It thereby short-circuits established power dynamics and traditional lines of communication. We believe that social media and marketing capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization. Social media also adds new dimensions to these traits. For example, it requires the ability to create compelling, engaging multimedia content. Leaders need to excel at cocreation and collaboration—the currencies of the social-media world. Executives must understand the nature of different social-media tools and the unruly forces they can unleash.

Benefits of Social Media in Selling

In the past, many social media policies were very restrictive. They forbid employees from mentioning where they worked or from accessing social media while at work. Those policies ignored the reality of business today. First of all, your employees are already using social media. You certainly don’t want them all spending their days on Facebook, but it’s difficult to expect that they’ll never check their social feeds while they’re taking a break, social media marketing agency or never look to social media to connect with prospects and customers. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – your employees are on social media, but so are your prospects and customers! If you don’t have a presence in your prospects’ conversations about your industry in the social space, you’re missing out! You have the opportunity to leverage your employees’ presence in these spaces to engage with prospects where they are. A strong presence in social media is also a great way to build your company’s brand and attract talent. If people see your team having fun and doing interesting things, they’ll want to be a part of it. This is a great way to help attract employees. How should salespeople interact with prospects on social media? Should they be prospecting on Facebook, Twitter, social media marketing company or LinkedIn? Are the rules different depending on the platform? Should employees be building their personal brands or setting themselves up as subject matter experts? How should they identify themselves in forums and groups? Think about these elements as your craft your policy, and make sure you review it after it’s been in place for a while to ensure it matches the current environment. Social media is a huge part of selling today, but it’s important to set clear guidelines with your social media policy.

The leader as adviser and orchestrator: Driving strategic social-media utilization

In most companies, social-media literacy is in its infancy. Excitement often runs high for the technology’s potential to span functional and divisional silos. But without guidance and coordination, and without the capabilities we discuss here, social-media enthusiasm can backfire and cause severe damage. To harvest the potential of social media, leaders must play a proactive role in raising the media literacy of their immediate reports and stakeholders. Within this 360-degree span, social media marketing plan template executives should become trusted advisers, enabling and supporting their environment in the use of social tools, while ensuring that a culture of learning and reflection takes hold. As a new and media-savvy generation enters the workplace, smart leaders can accelerate organizational change by harnessing these digital natives’ expertise through “reverse mentoring” systems (see later in this article). Steve Sargent, president and CEO of GE Australia and New Zealand, believes that social media is reshaping the leadership culture by pushing executives to span geographic boundaries, engage more closely with stakeholders, and amplify the impact of employees at the periphery. Over the past five years, as proof of concept, Sargent has established a mining-industry network that cuts across GE’s businesses and regions, linking informal teams that use social platforms to collaborate on solving customer needs. GE employees in Brazil, for instance, now work with colleagues in Australia to develop products and services for customers doing business in both social media marketing world countries. The network’s success led the company to elevate it to the status of a full-fledged GE mining business. “Markets today are complex and multidimensional, and leadership isn’t about control but about enabling and empowering networks,” Sargent says. “The type of leadership we need finds its full expression in the DNA of collaborative technology, and I am determined to leverage this DNA as much as I can.”