One of the big questions or issues in Social Media is whether CEOs should involve themselves in the social media space. Certainly, there are many CEOs who are immersed deeply in the social media environment, twittering, facebooking, etc…, however, these are mainly CEO of relatively modest sized companies. The CEOs of major companies prefer to stay out of the social media limelight…unless they are in that line of business.
Many blogs, articles, commentary and opinion pieces have been written on this topic. Since most of these pieces have been written by people with an interest (either financial or otherwise) in social media, the inevitable conclusion is that these big time CEOs are doing their companies a dis-favour by not engaging their “customers” and stakeholders through the various social media streams. I beg to differ for the following reasons:
– The average CEO of a Fortune 100 company has thousands upon thousands of stakeholders…its impossible to engage with everyone at a personal level without passing on the communication to a team. This is what the current “Community Managers” are already doing for the company so why create another channel which everyone will take to imply gets them more attention. It dilutes attention from the corporate social media engagement without really affording the close personal touch needed.
– The rules of Corporate Governance apply to all CEOs, so anyone expecting the inside scoop on Twitter or Facebook is going to be disappointed.
– Since its unlikely a CEO would put down his/her personal opinion of various staff, customers, etc…what does that leave you in terms of content?
– What would be the benefits to a “plugged in” CEO? A closer relationship with the customer? Building more PR sympathy? Actually, as any social media specialist worth their salt will tell you, no one will universally like you online, and the opinion trends can swing in seconds from positive to negative.
So given that the actual benefits are almost impossible to define, the potential pitfalls are many, the effort is huge, the status quo is comfortable, why on earth would any CEO of a Fortune 100 company even consider building their social media presence online (to say nothing of the fact that these CEOs change more frequently now too!)?
Some Meowsings...... 