Here’s another look at the problem of getting heads in the C suite round #social. Remember, very few CIOs in major companies are personally engaging with social media like Twitter and blogs; most report through the CFO (there’s a downer and a big blunder); and another study recently showed how little B2B companies were making use of social feedback.
What a mess. And what an opportunity. Anyone say competitive advantage?
Following up his earlier work on the bizarre fact that most Fortune 250 CIOs show little personal engagement with social media, Mark Fidelman zooms in on the guy who comes top of his rankings and is therefore the most social CIO in corporate America.
SAP’s Oliver Bussmann warns that CIOs are putting their careers in jeopardy if they haven’t dived into the social ocean.
I suggested recently that the great majority of CIOs should be shown the door and make way for replacements more in tune with the shockwave that social is spreading not simply through marketing but ultimately every aspect of 21st century business. The naive notion that you can just hire people to do it for you needs to be stamped on. Not that the CIO needs to have day-to-day involvement with the corporate presence. But if he or she does not blog about fishing or tweet about Hollywood then there is no fundamental understanding in the C suite of the revolutionary dynamics at play in this fluid and fast-changing social landscape.
My earlier piece: https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/social-risk-seems-cios-think-social-is-beneath-them/
SAP’s CIO: You’re Putting Your Executive Career at Risk if You’re Not Social – Forbes.
Fidelman’s earlier piece: http://harmon.ie/blog/04-04-2012
Terrific post here from @ginidietrich on silos inside the C suite. Seems to me that the two greatest enemies of everything in 2012 are silos and groupthink. They do of course go together, as when we climb out of them to do allegedly creative strategy together the problems of salience et al. emerge.
The situation of the C suite atop the traditional hierarchies of a functional organization is in fact a subset of the problems we have in handling knowledge when data has exploded and the age of expertise is in a significant respect over. It’s those who bridge knowledge silos who shape what comes next. Modeling and applying this in our organizations, one would have thought, was 101.
All eyes have been fixed on Facebook’s problem in building out its ad-based biz model as users migrate to the mobile frontier where everyone knows that is even harder.
But the other end of the convo from getting biz to support social websites is social business proper. And this is where it starts getting actually interesting. Because while the evidence keeps pouring in that many major companies simply haven’t begun to take this seriously, as they begin to it becomes clear that its impact will be revolutionary. It’s not just another ad channel, but a driver of transparency as corporate culture, mission, employee values, social relationships, all shuffle toward alignment.
More on this later. But a neat post from Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes surveying the scene with a focus on acquisitions as companies look to buy expertise and opportunity. There is a very great deal of the latter for those who decide to move seriously.
Ryan Holmes: What Is a Social Business App, Anyway? And Why Is the Market Booming?.
Marc Andreessen's Tweets in Blog Form
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