Why Your Social Media Revolution Should Come from the Top

It’s hard to believe that despite the life cycle of social media being only in its infancy, it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives so profoundly. Organizations have finally begun to recognize the importance of building a business platform that can seamlessly amalgamate the interests of employees and customers.  Companies are branching out via social media tools such as blogs, forums, viral videos, Facebook contests, etc. that allows customers to see the dynamic personalities driving corporate entities.                                        

Linear processes and conventional marketing models are rusted chains clinging to your organization’s arms, preventing it from reaching its true potential. In order to do so, bold and brilliant leaders who are willing to embrace social media must step up to the mantle and overhaul outdated business models to take your organization to new levels.

Here are 5 essential tips to follow to become a truly successful social media leader:

1. Develop Content People Care About

People like cats – true. People like cats enough to associate business awesomeness with the ability of your cat to do backflips – false.

People want to see authenticity from a business, not how good it is with felines. With the billions of videos, images and articles shared around the social web, as an executive you need to create content that people actually care about.

This is why smart executives realize that the authentic engagement of millions of viewers is directly dependant on the creativity and edginess you put into your content. This kind of creativity could be as simple as producing a weekly webinar of what you learned throughout the week, or an interview with an employee, or a discussion with a client. Engagement with and insight into your organization gives your company a personality that resonates with us regular folk.

2. Exercising Distribution Competence

A piece of content is only as amazing as its reach. No matter how amazing your content is, if no one ever sees it, it’s ultimately worthless. Sad but true. The true success your social media efforts are directly proportional to your ability to leverage your audience and promote your content.

As a leader, you must identify the key social networking influencers and evangelists in your niche and get them to blog and comment on your content. This will create a magnetic aura around your brand that will attract throngs of curious users.

3. Promoting Social Media Awareness

Leaders must be willing to play the role of a tutor to promote social media literacy in an organization. Hosting workshops and reverse mentoring programs for social media awareness will help employees better understand the importance of web 2.0 and lead to better online campaign strategies and internal evangelists of your organization.

Assigning additional positions to support the flow of networked communication such as content curators, network analysts, community administrators, etc. is a great initiative to effectively harness the power of social media.

4. Reconfiguring Your Organizational Infrastructure

As a leader, molding your company’s workflow infrastructure in a way to integrate vertical accountability and transparency with horizontal networking is a key challenge.

Valuing the expertise and feedback of your customers and employees and addressing their concerns will create a sense of collective responsibility for the state of your business.

5. Staying On Top of the Game

A strong leader must be well-versed in all the aspects of social media and consistently track the latest cutting-edge social media tools in the market.

As an executive, you are busy, and likely don’t have time to keep fully up to date with the constant changes in the social sphere. But you have employees. And some of them will have time. Even getting an employee to spend an hour a week or month on social media research could mean the difference between success and failure of your social strategy.

Social media is no longer about teenagers making status posts about what they had for dinner. It has evolved into a quintessential component of every organizations business development strategy. And the most successful organizations are those who see social input straight from the top.

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Leadership skills in digital economy

In the era driven by knowledge, immediacy and innovation, business leaders face the challenge to steer dynamic, motivated teams.

  

Leading a company in a competitive world today requires a combination of skills and abilities. Typically, business men and women focus their energies on what they perceive as their primary role: developing a strategy to reach the desired goals.

However, there are other aspects of leadership directly involved in teamwork leading. At this point, the first major strength lies in electing those who will accompany them until their goals are accomplished. So the first smart decision is to surround themselves with people best suited to carry out the purposes.

This selection criterion is as important as the subsequent need to lead a team of motivated individuals who believe that your work has facets of value and novelty. According to experts in leadership Steven Kramer y Teresa Amabile, employees are more productive and creative when they have a positive inner life. And for this, add the specialists, it is essential that your daily tasks provide them with something meaningful.

Now, what influence leaders have on creating dynamic and stimulating environment for their staff? Certainly, they play an important role. By the way, it is worth to quote an expert Robert Sutton, who argues that it is a leader, who establishes the “atmosphere” in the organization and thus sets the expected standards of behavior.

Economy of ideas

But passion for innovation and the importance of creative and enthusiastic development do not only promote efficiency in teams. In fact, these qualities are essential requirements to function successfully in today’s economy.

That is why business leaders should keep in mind the defining features of the digital economy, whose definition should not be limited to technological advances or mere existence of the Internet.

Here are some key features of the digital economy:

> Continuous innovation: while the life cycles of products and services shorten, the novelty comes due to system and technology innovations. From this point of view, the power of ideas becomes a core element.

> Permanent interconnections: technology does not only allow informational flow. Human resources have been “digitalized” and more and more professional services are provided remotely. Considering this point, business leaders face – more than ever – the challenge of coordinating projects with people from different countries and activities.

> Constant learning: many authors argue that to learn faster than competitors is “the only competitive advantage”. This concept is key and has to translate into organizational learning before individual skill development.

> Added value: information and ideas have become an essential part of any product or service. For this reason, the intellectual capital of people is a key asset in any company, as it is no longer possible to visualize a new product without considering its added value that will distinguish it from competitors.

Against this backdrop, it is vital to note that although the role of technology is undeniable, the value of ideas is more important. Therefore, business leaders of the digital economy must not only ensure the possession of appropriate technological resources; their greatest challenge is to generate and preserve work atmosphere that is encouraging and dynamic, or better yet, to develop real incubators for innovative projects. To this end, there is nothing more appropriate than a stimulating environment so that those who work with us know, are able and willing to adapt quickly and effectively to constant changes.

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