Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you’re the kind of boss who fails to make genuine connections with your direct reports, take heed: 91% of employees say communication issues can drag executives down, according to results from our new Interact/Harris Poll, which was conducted online with roughly 1,000 U.S. workers.

In the survey, employees called out the kind of management offenses that point to a striking lack of emotional intelligence ;among business leaders, including micromanaging, bullying, narcissism, indecisiveness, and more. In rank order, the following were the top communication issues people said were preventing business leaders from being effective....

Businesses can no longer afford to have top leaders sit on the social media sidelines, a new study finds. More than three-quarters of executives worldwide believe it is a good idea for CEOs to participate in social media, the research from public relations firm Weber Shandwick and research partner KRC Research found.

 

The study identified a wide array of benefits that come with top executives who are socially active online. More than 70% of those surveyed said CEO sociability increases information-sharing throughout the business, improves company reputation, demonstrates innovation, humanizes the company and improves business results....

Andrew Mason’s resignation letter last week reflected the best of storytelling in business communications.

 

With this in mind, I tried to track down Mr. Mason to take us behind the curtain in how the letter came about.

 

Unfortunately, he proved elusive.

 

If Mason had agreed to an interview, I suspect the exchange would have gone something like this:...

When someone has been at the coalface of thought leadership for 15 years, worked with two of the global thought leadership giants, PwC and E&Y and they say they no longer want to send their thought leadership out but rather get CFOs to download it, you sit up and take notice....

 

Among others she is on a drive to cut back dramatically on the amount of content they publish and they are personalising it as much as possible. She shared this and further insights with me...

It’s now more evident than ever that CEOs who don’t engage in social media, may as well be conducting their business in a cave....

...CEOs and their executives ride shotgun in setting the cultural tone of the organization. Simply put, participation in social media promotes the use of social technology, which can only increase its competitive edge in adapting to technological market changes. Having a transparent and open organizational culture is imperative in establishing an effective social media strategy; it gives everyone a clear and common focus to tailor to the needs of the social consumer – a fact that escapes a lot of today’s CEOs.

BrandFog 2012 CEO Survey concerned this exact topic and reproduced some baffling results:

- 82% of respondents were said to be more likely to trust a company whose CEO actively engages on Social Media.

- 77% of respondents were recorded to be more likely to buy from a company whose mission and values are defined through their leaderships’ involvement in Social Media....

Many pointed to the fact that Yahoo!’s working mom CEO got flack when Best Buy’s working dad CEO didn’t as unfair for gender inequity reasons.... ...Yahoo! builds exactly the kind of products designed to help work-at-home employees. On its face, then, Yahoo!’s rejection of such practices for its own employees looks like a brand misalignment. I mentioned this in a previous article and it generated a Twitter conversation that I thought deserved more than 140 characters. Lest you think that I am supporting the shut-down of work-at-home policies, I’m not. I want to show you that the extent to which such policy changes are made intentionally, and communicated in ways that help reinforce the brand promise to employees and customers, even unpopular decisions can reinforce a brand’s market position. Best Buy will have an easier time of this than Yahoo! for reasons outlined below. Creating a brand that makes sense to the market – especially when a leaked employee memo can the internet ablaze as Yahoo!’s did – means you have to avoid the 2 biggest mistakes of internal branding....

Want to know what Dirty Harry's leadership keys are? It's simple: No matter how badly things were going, Harry got results.

 

...Here are his five leadership keys — and you can use them, not shoot anyone, and still be a good company man or woman....