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There is a revolution sweeping through our lives, measured by our experiences with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the like, which is not being replicated in the organizations in which we work. For many of us, going to work means actually slowing down in our ability to gain information, insights and connections, relative to what we normally do at home in our private lives. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s true. The social media revolution moves at two speeds: “normal, gale-force change” at home, and “near-glacial speed” at work. As a result, in a world of unprecedented change, far too many organizations are unaware of how badly prepared they are for seeing into the future. The reason for this is always the same: there is a generation of managerial insight that they lack – a generation of leaders lost.
The idea of lost leaders originated in an OpEd piece in the Financial Times, written in 2010, when then-outgoing Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever, Simon Cliff, warned that there was, within his organization, a “lost generation” of brand managers who do not understand the web and social networks”[1] This lost generation has since turned out to be more than a Unilever-only problem; it appears endemic to large set of complex modern organizations who inhabit a wide-range of industries, and with managers across a diverse set of functions, all of whom are either uniformed, unaware or unprepared to deal with the opportunities and challenges inherent in the social media revolution.
As a result, these organizations have failed or hesitated to make smart moves employing social media, have missed-out on major opportunities, and/or have been blind-sided by disruptors that they never saw coming. Simon Cliff’s article did, however, awaken at least one, major European-based FMCG that took his warnings to heart and began an effort to remedy the lost leaders phenomenon.
The initiative started by identifying about 30 high-potential, yet young [mid-30s on average] Marketing professionals who were tasked with addressing the lack of organizational social media literacy, explore ways of remedying the issue, and then become “ambassadors” of change to the senior-most management. Taking advantage of the geographic dispersion of the group, they were asked to take on the role of “anthropologists", who would explore the most energizing brands in their own communities and then establish a personal social media presence – blogs, facebook and twitter – to share and compare their findings. After several months of gathering impressions, they then spent a week together to create a story of what each team had discovered, and to understand how to best use their findings to make a difference within their own organization. It was this combination of messages that was then presented to the senior leaders of the company.
The exercise yielded a number of lessons that speak to the importance of the quest for achieving “Organizational Social Media Literacy”:
We believe that the lessons from this experience are valuable and worth considering if we want to bring big-change into reluctant organizations.
This section is dedicated to contributions and comments that deal with more than one of the six skills.
It contains also other ideas and experiences related to the impact of social media on large organizations
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