Why Executives Who Don't Understand Social Media Need to Go

While politicians bickered in front of television cameras and C-Level Execs crossed lines through the names of employees they are going to have to let go of when the Dow dips below 8,000, Marc Benioff, President and CEO of Salesforce.com, started a revolution last week at Dreamforce, the largest Tech conference in the world. And there was nothing quiet about it.

The theme of the conference was Welcome to the Social Enterprise and to any of the 45,000+ who attended or the equal number who watched Dreamforce through streaming online video, it is very clear that communication, marketing, sales and service in the future will not be originating in call centers or hand shakes across the counter of brick and mortar buildings anymore.

They will start in the cloud.

They will start on Twitter.

They will start on Facebook.

They will start on Foursquare.

They will start on LinkedIn.

They will start in places that don't exist yet and through mediums we've never even thought about.

The call centers and handshakes still matter but they have now become second base, a higher tier to get to that companies and businesses must pay their dues with prospects in order to turn them into customers. And the field those dues will be paid on is through social media.

In 2005, I gave a presentation on blogging and RSS to a group of mid-level executives at the nation's largest health insurer. You would have thought I was trying to teach them alchemy, trying to turn their TPS reports into gold. They didn't get it. I'll bet they still don't get it. But they're about to.

I tweeted a question to the Dreamforce audience (because the ones who understand were on Twitter talking to each other asynchronously during the conference) and said "I wonder how many Executives sitting the Dreamforce audience feel stupid because their companies block their employees from using Facebook and Twitter." The Tweet got laughs but I imagine there was also an uncomfortable pause as the terror of implication set it. These social media outlets are merging together, not in name or incorporation, but in functionality and your mother and father, your babysitter, your high school girlfriend, your wife and kids are all using them now and will continue to use them to shape their realities, their relationships and, most importantly for businesses, their purchasing decisions.

Let me tell you quick story about Costco and how they are winning in the Corporate Spring Revolution. My family shops at Costco for 70% of our food. The nearest Costco is 30 minutes away from us. We drink lots of milk and Costco carries an organic milk that has a shelf life of a month and a half. So when we buy milk at Costco, we buy 15 half gallons at a time. Sometimes we drink so much, we have to make a second trip. Well, the last time we went, they didn't have the cardboard half gallons, they had plastic gallons with a 2 week expiration date. Like any good consumer would, we had a visceral reaction of horror.

So when I got home, I went to Costco's Facebook page and posted my outrage, demanding an answer. Within a few hours, someone from Costco had responded to my comment, letting me know the situation was only temporary, that there was an issue with one of their suppliers and some locations had to mitigate with the plastic gallons.

I didn't make a phone call. I didn't write a letter. I didn't make an appointment. I spent two minutes and thirty seconds to express my frustration in an open venue and a live person went and got me the answer and responded to me like the representative of a company seeking to retain my business should--with truth expressed in common words with authentic empathy. Then they thanked me for being a customer. Now what more can customers ask for when we talk about good service?

But what if Costco blocked their employees from using Facebook? Nobody would have been there to respond to me. I would have started buying my milk at another grocery store closer to my house and I would always be stocked up when I finally made the monthly trek to Costco, so sorry Charlie but they would have lost my drinkable dairy money each month. But they didn't. They were Johnny on the Spot and they treated me with respect, information, appreciation and they won the right to keep me as a customer and the privilege of having me write a glowing public review (you just read it) which is worth more in value than pay per click advertising will ever be.

Imagine taking a call center and taping the mouths and ears shut of all the phone reps. They can't listen to or talk back to the customers calling in with service issues and they can't try to sell interested prospects, raising their hands to buy. How effective would that company be? How long would they last? Well, that is exactly what is going on at companies who refuse to allow, indeed do not strongly encourage, their employees to engage their customers and prospects in social media outlets. They are deaf and dumb to the future.

So what should shareholders and Boards of Directors do with the CIO who isn't breaking down the firewall to open up social media in the workplace? What do they do with the CEO who isn't pushing for an open and transparent enterprise-wide social media strategy? They get rid of them just like the citizens of the Middle East are throwing out these dictator bums who no longer understand that the world has changed and they are no longer effective in their purpose.

If a company is serious about competing in the future marketplace of ideas, goods and services--they had better establish a genuine social media presence online, make it accessible and engage with their current and future clientele like one would speak with others at a cocktail party. There are no excuses for accepting anything less.

POST LINKS:

• CLICK HERE to Watch the Dreamforce 2011 Keynote Speech


• CLICK HERE to buy Gary Vaynerchuk's book "The Thank You Economy"


• CLICK HERE  to Watch Marc Benioff (CEO Salesforce) and Eric Scmidt (CEO Google) talk about the future at Dreamforce 2011


• CLICK HERE to watch Burberry getting it right in the social media space

PHOTO:  Monument to 1795 Slave Revolt, Landhuis Kenepa, Curaçao © by cphoffman42