http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#AXs5Ju/www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/132126/

Better SM execution is very important, but driving adoption through CEO’s office is also critical.
Marketing pros are doing great job of selling one another and driving SM adoption in their domain, but there is much work to be done in selling the CEO.
As reported in Computerworld (http://ow.ly/tkoL)- 54% of organizations block social media use at workplace. As also reported, Facebook and Twitter adoption have slowed dramatically in last several months.
For company adoption, this is partially driven by productivity and security fears (some well founded) and CEOs not understanding or relating to the critical benefits. CEO calls IT, IT says employees spending an average of 1.5 hours a day on Facebook, CEO says turn it off now.

We hear a lot about ‘CEOs not getting it.’ Marketing pros can drive this in the right direction if they stop selling each other and start selling CEOs. Know your audience — we work with CEOs every day and a simple argument works well – it’s all about SALES.

SM = authentic conversations with customers = increased SALES and customer retention.

No SM = elimination of customer conversations = ignored sales opportunity and customer attrition risk.

Another argument that sticks — social media forces companies into a customer voice selling culture.  Listen to your customers, talk WITH them about what THEY want to talk about, and integrate that feedback into everything you do. All CEOs strive every day to stay close to the customer, and SM is tremendous way of enabling that.

Thoughts?

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