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Business Focus
Aligned with the drop in confidence
reported in the PwC report, it is interesting
to turn also to the Edelman Trust Barometer
(
Edelman, 2017b
). Their 2017 study findings
showcase that the general global population’s
trust in four key areas – business, government,
non-government organisations (NGOs) and
media – has declined recently, too. This is a
trend unseen since they started tracking trust
amongst these segments in 2012. Their latest
findings report that, whilst trust is down
generally across the board, from a business
landscape perspective, trust in CEOs is at an
all-time low of just 37 per cent.
In summary, the findings from these reports
highlight two key challenges: 1) keeping
up with the pace and breadth of digital and
technological continuous advances is becoming
more of a challenge for leaders; 2) leaders
are not doing enough to engender trust and
build stronger relationships with customers.
Admittedly, the above studies focus on larger
corporations – but these same challenges filter
down as very real issues for small businesses
and even micro-businesses.
I have met a significant number of people
who, whilst very competent in their areas
of expertise, regardless of the size of their
organisation, feel at the very least overwhelmed
with the pace of change and keeping up with
technology. The two key aspects of 1) keeping
up with the pace of change, and 2) building
stronger relationships with customers, are very
real challenges for all leaders.
In the context of social media being part of
our digital transformation, turning to the first
challenge of keeping up with change, whilst it
is encouraging that more CEOs and leaders are
starting to take to the social media stage, recent
research from a variety of sources suggests that
the shift to becoming a ‘social leader’ is not
moving fast enough.
In 2010, Weber Shandwick launched a
research study,
Socialising Your CEO
. Over the
past seven years they have been tracking an
index measuring the online presence of CEOs
on social networks and their level of social
media engagement.
The 2017 findings (
Weber Shandwick, 2017
)
showcase that whilst CEO presence on social
networks is at first encouraging, with 92 per
cent of the US top 50 Fortune 500 CEOs having
a social media presence, only 22 per cent of
CEOs have actually engaged (defined as having
written a post or responded) in the past 12
months.
With 82 per cent of customers being more
likely to trust a company whose leadership team
engages with social media, it’s never been more
important to get to grips with being social.
This extract from
Get Social
by
Michelle Carvill
is ©2018 and
reproduced with
permission from
Kogan Page Ltd.
“Keeping up with the pace
and breadth of digital and
technological continuous
advances is becoming more
of a challenge for leaders”