Better Leadership Through Social Media

Most executives don't want yet another platform to deal with. They aren't looking at it the right way.

"Join a new online network? I'd love to!"

In 15 years of helping business, government and nonprofit leaders make strategic choices about digital technology, I've yet to hear an executive utter those words.

Sometimes that's due to the risks of public embarrassment or conflict that come with online engagement. Sometimes it's painful memories of previous tech projects that ran over budget and behind schedule. And sometimes it's because executives would rather interact face-to-face than keyboard-to-keyboard.

But always, I hear a common concern: How can I add another platform, task list or set of relationships to my already full plate?

Social media have only made that problem more acute. While blogging, Twitter and Facebook have brought new opportunities for conversation, knowledge gathering and relationship building, those opportunities may feel more daunting than dazzling to overloaded executives.

The solution is to stop looking at social media as another platform you have to learn—yet another responsibility—and start seeing it for what it can be instead: a personal toolbox for improving your practice of leadership.

Each tool and activity described below requires a certain investment of time to set up. But once it's part of your routine, it will repay you with insights into work and leadership, and with freed-up time. Start with one, so you can see the payoff before adding more setup jobs to your busy agenda. But do start.

Here are six ways you can use social media to enhance your leadership.

Create a Leadership Dashboard

Don't just monitor the Web for intelligence about your business and brand; mine it for ideas, news and research that will help you develop as a leader. Use iGoogle, Google Reader or an iPad aggregator like Flipboard to subscribe to a range of blogs, columnists and news searches that offer insights into new leadership models, profiles of high-functioning executives, academic research on leadership and summaries of the latest business books. Set aside 15 to 30 minutes a day to read the articles that speak to you, or make this your end-of-day reading for the homeward commute. Read More

Chipotle Scores An Unexpected Social Media Win With Grammy Ad

Last night's Grammy awards was not the Super Bowl, which broke a tweets-per-second record, but it was still a chance for advertisers to tap into an audience watching the event on television and using second screens to discuss the event on social media.

But, much as they did last week, most brands scored a big swing-and-a-miss: big, because Twitter was already super-charged with Saturday night's death of Whitney Houston, meaning some people who had no plans to watch the broadcast were tuning in after reading tweets about the 48-year-old singer.

It looks like the Grammys failed to break the tweets-per-second record with its tribute to Houston as some had predicted, but even before the broadcast started, E! Television was reporting that Houston's death was generating about 30,000 tweets per minute, including 1,500 tweets per second in the hour after her death was first reported Saturday night. Sunday's Grammy Awards broadcast clearly benefited from the timing of her death, drawing 39 million viewers. It was the second highest total of all-time, and shattered last year's viewership of 26.6 million viewers.

No brand, obviously, was looking to capitalize from Houston's death. But few brands seemed poised to benefit on the increased use of second screens even if it had been a normal broadcast in a normal year, according to Lora Schaeffer, Resource Interactive's director of social media.

"Brands need to catch up with increasingly social consumers and realize that it's not just a social missed opportunity, but a commerce missed opportunity," Schaeffer said. "Technological barriers continue to fall as consumer adoption of purchasing through social and mobile channels continue to rise....For every brand that fails to come to that realization, a competitor is already working to deliver on that vision."

The unexpected winner from Schaeffer's point of view was Chipotle, which used the event to showcase its first national ad in its 18-year history. The two-minute animated ad, featuring Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's "The Scientist," blew up Twitter even though the advertisement didn't cross-reference social media channels. 

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API: Three Letters That Change Life, the Universe and Even Detroit

Sam Ramji met AT&T chief technology officer John Donovan on a speed date — or at least the tech world equivalent of a speed date.

In 2009, some big-name venture capitalists arranged for lightning-fast meetings between AT&T’s top brass and the brains behind various Silicon Valley startups, including Ramji’s new venture: Apigee, a company that builds and operates APIs. That’s tech-world speak for the software that lets things like Facebook, Google and Twitter talk to all those applications on your iPhone.

Apigee helps companies connect themselves to as many applications as possible — and ultimately reinvent the way they do business — but Ramji wasn’t sure he could help AT&T. Or at least, that’s what he said. According to Donovan, when Ramji showed up for their speed date, he played hard-to-get. “You guys don’t move fast enough to play in our game,” he told Donovan.

Just a few years ago, that may have been true. But today, it’s not. AT&T ended up joining forces with Apigee, building APIs that let outside software developers build phone and tablet applications that do everything from sending text messages across the AT&T cellular network to charging payments straight to a user’s monthly AT&T bill. By December of last year, the telecom giant was handling 4.6 billion API calls a month on its network, and Donovan believes that number will reach 10 billion by the end of 2012. “That’s the same range,” he says, “as the top web companies.”

There was a time when APIs — or Application Programming Interfaces — were just a way of building applications for a desktop operating system like Microsoft Windows. But in the age of the internet, they have the power to plug applications into, well, almost anything. They’ve already transformed websites like Google and Facebook and Twitter into services that talk to a world of other applications, across PCs as well as mobile phones. But that’s small potatoes. They’re also breathing new life into old-world operations, including mobile carriers like AT&T and even auto makers like General Motors. In January, GM — another Apigee partner — said it would offer APIs for OnStar, the communications service it builds into cars.

“Companies are really changing the way they develop their products and deliver their products,” says Ted Shelton, a former software developer and chief strategy officer at Borland Software who is now a managing director at management consultant PwC, where he helps companies build APIs too. “We’re seeing [API efforts] in virtually every industry. We’ve done work in healthcare, in finance, manufacturing, shipping and logistics, automotive. Whether you’re a company that serves consumers or other businesses, there is an enormous need to expose both data and business processes in ways that others can make use of it.” Read More

Wendy’s Wins 2011 Golden Tweet Award

Twitter, the social-media micro-blogging platform, last week reported that The Wendy’s Co. of Dublin, Ohio, won its 2011 Golden Tweet honors for the most retweets for a less-than-140-character Father’s Day Tweet it had paid for.

And on Tuesday, McDonald’s Corp. bought a “promoted tweet” for most of the day that foreshadows an upcoming Big Mac promotion, which also employs web and Facebook pages.

“Wendy’s offered to donate 50 cents for every retweet, and the world responded by sharing the tweet for a good cause,” Twitter said on its advertising blog.

The winning tweet was: “RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50[cents sign] to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd.” Twitter said the tweet raised $50,000 to help foster children. Read More