ever got pinged by your CEO? - redux
Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 10:42 am by Andreas Wuerfel
A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.
Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
That was in early December. Fast forward to today - Mr. Obermann’s LinkedIn profile vanished. Gone. Taken off the site.
As I had done for my original post on this, I quickly checked on the LinkedIn status of some of the other transatlantic telecom CEOs.
Turns out, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard still is without a named LinkedIn presence. But the FT chairman’s office does maintain an anonymous profile, which, since my last count in early December, shrank from 556 connections then, to now 49.
Further south, Telecom Italia’s Franco Barnabe continues to be on LinkedIn, albeit without a single connection to his name. Hence, no change here since my initial December check.
Meanwhile BT’s Ben Verwaayen - now rather casually listing under Ben V - continues his social networking presence, although only with a single connection under his belt so far.
To be sure, no status changes over in the US, where both the CEO of AT&T and Verizon continue to stay away from LinkedIn and probably social networking altogether. (Unless, of course, they use an alias).
What might all of this mean?
For one, CEOs of large multinational corporation have other things do to than getting their groove on in online social networking.
But can their corporate communications departments afford to stay away?
Much like consumer product companies begin to value the Web’s dialog marketing capabilities (think Coke wants to be your friend on Facebook), there are plenty benefits in adding a two-way corporate PR component to interface with employees and other stakeholders online.
To that end, research fellow and professor at France’s INSEAD business school, Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta, recently publish their book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Change Your Life, Work and World.
For today’s CEOs, the book holds key insight why online social media matters in our increasingly interconnected world:
- Use the interweb’s social networking capabilities to communicate / learn / instigate
- Understand online social media to infuse / maintain values of openness / transparency
- Gain social graph skills to reach beyond staffers, into customers / the public / media
To Mr. Obermann’s credit (and that of his PR team), he does make regular, wide-spread use of interactive communications tools and capabilities.
But these efforts remain largely locked inside the company’s Intranet. By definition a closed-off undertaking, I suspect his telecom CEO peers have taken a similarly safe approach.
Yet, much of today’s employee and corporate discussion takes place out online, via hugely popular user group platforms such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, and XING.
What’s more, staffers bring these and other professional social sites right into the enterprise; in the process blending internal and external networking, to improve targeted quality exchange of business ideas to the benefit of their employer.
Ultimately, for top management to shun Web-based social software is akin to missing annual employee appreciation parties, sales kick-offs, and public relations events, all wrapped into one.
As professional communications in and around the workplace continues to change dramatically, CEOs and their corporate communications departments should join the conversation.
Not just to listen, but also to be heard.
Andreas, I absolutely agree that corporations should be, well, need to be part of the conversation that is going on out there. The time of sitting in the ivory tower and speaking at customers from that elevated point has come to an end with the advent of social tools.
Corporations, and that includes the CEO, need to become more open and transparent. Consumers want to interact with human beings and not with brands. This constitutes a big challenge for the corporate communications and marketing department, and as it seems also for the DT’s PR agency.
I would be very interested to hear about the objective of setting up a LinkedIn profile for Rene Obermann. Too often people (companies, agencies) try to use tools and services without having defined their business goals and target audience. That’s like going to a Chinese restaurant, even though you want to have pizza that night.
Rather than just joining any social network that comes along these days, DT’s PR agency should concentrate on a concrete business need.
One that comes to mind quite quickly is reputation (I hope I am not being offensive here). In Germany DT does not have the best reputation and blocking the Skype iPhone application won’t be very helpful in this case. The PR agency of DT should first identify the target audience and find out where they hang out on the Internet. They should listen to what people have to say and then join the conversation in an open and honest way. And yes, sometimes these conversations are difficult, but even if DT turned its back on those people, the conversations would not stop. More likely, conversations will spread and ultimately DT will loose existing and prospect customers.
DT should have a look at what other companies are doing. Here are some examples. But again, DT needs to align its social media strategy to the overall business strategy. These are exciting times, but it’s easy to get “punked by social media .
Last but not least, I was wondering if you knew about ExecTweets . Maybe in the near future you can ping Rene and ask about his LinkedIn profile ;).