Is social media really a new function in organizations? And if not do we really need a CSMO, Chief Social Media Officer? Knee jerk reactions aside, more and more CEOs are instead recognizing the power of personally leveraging
social media to lead their socially networked organizations.

The most effective leaders throughout history have been great communicators.

• Monitoring activity and accomplishments of individuals at all levels of the organization to recognize them. Understanding the power of recognition both monetary and non monetary to encourage and reinforce desired actions and admonish or discourage negative behavior.

• Communicating and engaging in active company wide social dialogues across the organization at all levels.

• Fostering collaboration on platforms that allow junior employees to tap into the tribal knowledge of those more experienced to meet and overcome challenges.

• Giving all employees a voice to make suggestions or speak out against potentially bad policy decisions and changes.

• Experimenting and shifting to new forms of more effective models of collaborative leadership. Consider the power of “Leading from the Middle”

But don’t take our word for it, hear it directly from the below CEOs who share their positive socially enhanced leadership experiences.

Next meet a CEO who’s already become a Chief Social Media Officer, Giam Swiegers, CEO Deloitte Australia reviews every Yammer conversation within his organization every 48 hours. Seventy-five percent of their employees are digital natives and social tools are how they communicate. Specific examples of rapid collaboration and how the organization has been flattened with first year Analysts already challenging and refuting bad policy changes already emerging. Giam believes that within a few years you will not be able to be an effective CEO without engaging in social dialogue.

Last but certainly not least John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco shares some great social leadership approaches that have evolved at Cisco. “Leading from the Middle” versus a “Command and Control” mentality have proven fruitful at this networking leader.

Most importantly these messages aren’t coming from social media gurus or software start up hucksters. Instead these are seasoned business leaders who have recognized and latched onto the power of these tools. As social CEOs they have already recognized and harnessed the collaborative, connective and communications benefits of social for their organizations.

The short answer to our question is yes! CEOs can, should and in many cases have already become Chief Social Media Officers.

For those CEOs still sitting on the fence the time to engage is now.

Embrace the use of social tools to listen to your organization.

When you’re finally ready to engage be authentic, be social and lead.

Jeff Ashcroft

“Becoming a B2B Social Sales Machine” in simple, sales oriented terms explains what the B2B social networking sales opportunity means. Sharing how both individuals and ultimately the combined organization can leverage content, connections, context, collaboration and community to drive real results!

Content

The ongoing explosion of easily sharing a myriad of truly engaging social content types across computers, tablets and smartphones. What are all these content types? How can the entire organization contribute?

Connections

Social business networks are growing rapidly. Which ones are best for your B2B business? How can your people engage in “socially” acceptable ways? How can you gain first mover competitive advantage in your markets and verticals?

Context

Once content and connections are in place you’re prepared to leverage the “secret sauce” of social context. Traditional marketing communications only allowed for one way context broadcast. Now social networks can be monitored for multiple context scenarios you already know can drive sales.

Collaboration

Take team selling to a whole new level eliminating past silos of both function and geography. Create real time collaborative selling based on ALL of your employees acting as sensors, advocates, influencers and connectors.

Community

Bring all of the above factors together to create vibrant and powerful internal and external communities. Make your community the destination for thought leadership and continuous activity/engagement. Truly earn the ongoing attention and participation of both current and potential customers.

The above just scratches the surface to give you an indication of the B2B sales opportunity arising from each team member, and ultimately the entire organization, becoming a social sales machine.

Socially energizing your entire organization is an empowering transformation and can truly be a force multiplier in accelerating the B2B sales process.

Jeff Ashcroft

Feel free to contact me @TheSocialCMO or via email to discuss how you can bring some excitement and insight to your next sales or company meeting.

@TreyPennington was one of the earliest members of @TheSocialCMO Crew and this week at the age of 45 he lost his battle with depression.

In his time with us, Trey contributed much to The Social CMO penning 21 posts (see them here) and probably the most poignant of these is Gratitude Fuels Community which I’m sure you will all agree is a very tough one to read this week.

Two of his best are Cut Through the Marketing Clutter with Storytelling and Confessions of a World Traveller. In both cases Trey was over the top with the image selections made which took both of these defining posts on his passion for the story and his social journey to another level.

He was also one of the few who participated twice on #MMchat, both times on his favorite topic of Storytelling and you could just feel how he thrived on having thousands of others passionate about his favorite topic interacting with him in real time. These sessions really brought out the best in him and he shared some real gems with all of us on Storytelling in what was only our fourth #MMchat just one year ago on August 10th, 2010.

With so many of The Social CMO Crew members spread around the continent and the world we weren’t sure of the best way to say farewell and pay tribute, so we decided it was only fitting to create a montage of 140 character tweets to together express our individual thoughts.

These are displayed below bringing all of our voices together to say.

Farewell Trey, we will all miss you…

As with any new disruptive technology, social networking usage in enterprise business is still in its’ infancy with marketers in a preferred position to gain advantage. CMO’s can benefit from being first movers in introducing and adopting social networking technologies to become social leaders within their organizations.

This Social Business webinar for marketers and their vendor providers examines each of these roles based upon the feedback received from a Constellation Research Group survey of marketing leaders conducted in May/June 2011.

Register here and join Jeff Ashcroft as he reveals an emerging social business vision based on The Four Hats of The Social CMO!

Look out for the release of the full report The Four Hats of The Social CMO in early September!

Jeff Ashcroft

With this in mind we are today introducing The Social CMO Survey and hope to get input and feedback from all you Social CMOs and aspiring Social CMOs out there! Take The Social CMO Survey!

The results of this survey will give us a better handle on where chief marketers and senior marketing managers are at today with Social Media and most importantly where they are going.

At the same time, these responses will allow us to develop a better picture of current CMO personas, how these are evolving and where they are headed as we continue to move forward into a social digital marketing future.

So what are you waiting for, take a few minutes and contribute to this important research! Every qualified participant properly completing the survey will be sent a summary report of the results once they are tabulated.

Here’s the link to The Social CMO Survey and we look forward to the responses from all you Social CMOs out there!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

All we can do is look at the evidence of these changes and it is mounting. We review the numerous attempts to impair internet communications and access to social media and start by sharing this quote during the crisis in Egypt.

“Clearly, what’s rattled the government is the major role that social media has played in the protests rocking the country’s cities, including Cairo.

“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google Docs have been used in unprecedented ways this time around — both for coordination, and for disseminating news,” Jillian York, Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Our small, medium and large screens are filled with images from around the world starting from the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, first the fall of #Tunisia, then #Egypt and now #Libya where it seems to only be a matter of time.

And not surprisingly, at this time even the protests in Iran and China are starting to heat up again and the governments there are clamping down quickly each time before the protest momentum can build to any significant level.

But interestingly there are also emerging examples here in North America surrounding both labor #wiunions and entertainment #oscars that are also demonstrative of the accelerating impact of social.

Of specific interest from a North American perspective are the events now taking place in Madison Wisconsin where the Governor is taking on organized public sector labor and meeting significant resistance.

One of the common reactions by leaders in all of these cases has been their attempts to shut down communications, whether it is social media site blocking, internet access, mobile/wireless networks, phone lines and even banning journalists. Here are reports on these activities from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, China and most surprisingly even from Madison, Wisconsin!

Based on all the different workarounds that appeared, allowing people to transmit their tweets elsewhere to be posted, it has become apparent that there is no longer effective ways for governments to stop people who have the will to communicate.

In the entertainment world, the power of the hashtag is also being clearly demonstrated today. @TheAcademy Awards don’t start in for another four hours and the hashtag #oscars has already been included in 725,000 tweets and they are coming in at a rapidly accelerating 600 per minute.(Ed. note: #oscars tweets topped out just over 1.9 million with peak rate of 12,000 per minute during show)

Many of these protests have been drives for the freedom to replace leaders living opulent lives on the backs of people who are dissatisfied with low wages, high unemployment and rising food prices due to shortages. Personally though, I am very surprised by the people I talk to who think these are problems that are isolated to the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere, as there are many disenfranchised, impoverished and unemployed people in all parts of the world.

We are in the early days of unrest fueled by the ability to organize and mobilize quickly facilitated by social networking. Look at all of the significant changes underway at this point when less than 1 billion are registered on the main social media platforms. Think of this in the context of a world population which is approaching 7 billion the majority of which are already armed with mobile devices.

Looking at this from both business and government perspectives, obvious parallels can easily be drawn to ineffective leaders anywhere in the world as their employees, shareholders and citizens communicate, connect, discover and wield the power of the #hashtag.

Jeff Ashcroft

So who are @TheSocialCMO PR Divas? Well the first to join us was Amy @HowellMarketing who’s agreement to contribute to this blog with me was the first step in Lighting the Social Media Fire at The Social CMO and had she declined who knows if we’d even be blogging for you today.

Shortly after this @AnneDGallaher Owner/CEO of the Deeter Gallaher Group LLC, a Pennsylvania marketing/PR firm came on board providing insights and introductions into PR and social media as it is applied in some of the largest and best known brands in the world.

The next of @TheSocialCMO PR Divas to join us was fellow Canadian @DebWeinstein who is an internationally acclaimed PR Pro, President and Co-founder of Strategic Objectives, Canada’s most award-winning PR agency.

And last but not least an interesting post on How Social Media is Changing Public Relations was also contributed by our very own Renee Warren @Renee_Warren founder of Renee Warren Communications and now Spark Boutik.

Please find below a selection of great PR and social media posts contributed by our @TheSocialCMO PR Divas!

What Your PR Firm Should Be Doing For Your Business! Our @TheSocialCMO Star! Amy @HowellMarketing

Amy @HowellMarketing BP’s PR and Lessons to Learn ~ Crisis management learnings from BP’s other disaster

HOW to add Twitter to your PR mix in 9 easy steps ~ @AnneDGallaher

Impact and Value of Social Media in PR ~ Amy @HowellMarketing @AnneDGallaher

Deborah Weinstein: My Most Excellent Entrepreneurial Adventure ~ The story of a PR star in the making! @DebWeinstein

How Social Media is Changing Public Relations ~ Renee Warren @Renee_Warren

Hope these blogposts help both up and coming and established PR professionals gain further insight into the evolving interaction between public relations and social media. Thanks Amy, Anne, Deb and Renee for sharing these insights and as always your contributions are most appreciated! Cheers!

Jeff Ashcroft

The level of interaction on the chat was excellent and we learned a number of new things about Klout and where it is going when @JoeFernandez took the stage on #MMchat for a tweetchat with you all about Measuring Influence in the Social Media World. Who better to talk about measuring influence than the man leading Klout the standard indicator for measuring online influence?

Please take some time to review and the transcript from last night’s #MMchat with @JoeFernandez.

Thanks to all of you #MMchat tweeps and others for joining us last night and sharing your thoughts and questions on such an important topic, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

After beginning the book with a short history of on brands and the phases of brand development since 1860, co-authors Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover compare the period of transition to social we are now currently in, to the Mad Men period of transition from radio/print to television.

But the power to be gained by transitioning to a wikibrand mindset really comes from recognizing and developing a better understanding of, then leading your organization across the Marketing Divide (see below graphic). Even more importantly, the book explores how marketers, through leading the migration across this divide to a social future, have the opportunity to again elevate the marketing function to it’s rightful place leading the parade of an engaged and dynamically connected company and it’s community of customers.

Not sure if this is another Mad men reference, but the authors also lay out and detail their FLIRT concept which represents Focus, Language and content, Incentives, motivation and outreach, Rules and rituals and lastly Tools and platforms. This represents the construct Moffitt and Dover recommend to build out a wikibrand and I will leave it to the authors to further convey as they explain fully in the book.

Once you’ve mastered the concepts around flirting, it’s time to get your wikibrand show on the road with what they describe as “Incubating Your Wikibrand Community” including sharing insightful methods for community development, internalization, management and of course measurement & metrics.

Wrapping up, in his Foreword to the book, “Reinvention of the Brand” Don Tapscott suggests this may be a seminal work and I tend to agree. I say this because too many marketers out there are still treating social as an oddity and handling it with their kid gloves. If Wikibrands does nothing else(and it does), it should through the logical analysis and evolutionary brand progression provided, lead marketers still offside with social to the realization that it is far from an oddity, but rather a portal to our emerging future.

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Full disclosure: For purposes of transparency, we did receive a review copy of the Wikibrands book.

Flickr: bighugelabs

In looking at all the blogs we’ve created, there are four words that resonate and help us to better frame this discussion, and these are Trust, Relationships, Social Capital and of course… Influence.

Trust

Role of Trust in Engagement ~ Who Do You Trust? @ScottMonty http://bit.ly/WhoDoYouTrust

Extend your influence by extending trust: a social story @TreyPennington http://bit.ly/AsocialStory

Relationships

Conversations, Relationships & Renaming Social Media #socialCMO @EricFletcher suggests novel internal approach http://bit.ly/9tHkR6

Beyond Connections, to Building Relationships ~ what it takes to move from contact to relationship @EricFletcher http://bit.ly/ba1quD

The Relationship Commerce Revolution @TedRubin http://bit.ly/b1WFbC

Questions and Answers about Relationship Marketing and Relationship Commerce @TedRubin http://bit.ly/QandAonROR

ROR = Return on Relationships! Full transcript of Mktr Monday Chat with @TedRubin http://bit.ly/Ted_Rubin

Using LinkedIn Groups for Better Relationships and More Business Viveka von Rosen @LinkedInExpert http://bit.ly/cBASCl

Social Capital

Social Media Capital: New paradigm for Value Creation, Learning & Leadership ~ @JeffAshcroft http://ow.ly/UU3L

@VenessaMiemis and her debut post ~ Social Capital is not the same as Whuffie http://bit.ly/cFY8ha

Influence

How do I increase my influence on Twitter? @MarkWSchaefer http://bit.ly/cFY8ha

The Great Influence Debate ~ Jeff Wilson @JefftheSensei http://bit.ly/_influence

What type of social network influences behaviour? @MollyFlatt http://bit.ly/ase5jR

Role of Major Influencers in Cause Marketing #MMchat with @ChrisBrogan http://bit.ly/CHRIS_BROGAN

Why I still don’t care what your Klout score is. ~ @SueSpaight http://bit.ly/eBHjQv

There is no doubt there is power in social influence and emerging new forms of social capital even “currencies” continue to evolve in these fast moving times.

But as you will see from reviewing a number of the above posts, there is still much controversy surrounding both it and the methods around measurement of this elusive and evolving thing we call influence.

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO