Referrals and leads for CEOs are at a minimal level from your members' social media connections with other CEOs because the whole social media networking arena is still in an early adopter phase.
As I've been preaching, your participation in this discussion group, reading my blog, and taking the Chair e-Course I run on how to leverage social media will put you way ahead of the power curve when using social media becomes more commonly used by the vast majority of small and entrepreneurial businesses.
However, I am convinced we can drag a large portion of your members into inserting their toe into the water of using social media. Once they begin this "putting their toe in the water" process, I do believe the floodgates will open in their recognition of the many areas in which they could use social media in their companies.
For example, social media could have a dramatic impact on employee engagement, customer interaction, customer service, marketing, sales, pr, and recruiting. Of all these uses of social media, I might be a little biased - but I think recruiting lends itself to immediate use and ROI. Some of the areas may be a little more of a reach to tie quantifiable outcomes to the investment of time spent on social media.
Recruiting through social media (OR social recruiting) can demonstrate it's impact/ROI/benefit immediately.
As a result, I've developed a Speaker Program to teach Vistage/TEC Members how to leverage Social Media to find and recruit top talent. I'm delivering this program to a Vistage Group this week for the first team. The big question I've got is how it will be accepted by the CEOs. Will CEOs perceive there is both a benefit to them personally using tools like LinkedIn and to their executives and managers?
If you would be interested in receiving a PDF of the Slide Deck for the Presentation, please let me know and I'll forward it to you. I am also considering putting together a short 5-10 audio-podcast narrated overview of the Speaker Program.
A number of Chairs have been pushing me to create a similar program to the Chair e-Course I lead for Vistage/TEC members to use in learning about how to leverage social media for their sales function in terms of lead generation and nurturing. Although this appears to be an interesting application - I still think the use of social media for most Vistage and TEC members will first come through the recruiting function.
Once that happens and CEOs start to get personally committed and active in places like LinkedIn, you should start to see your referral and lead generation explode.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this observation that a little education on how to use social media in recruiting for your members might be the tipping point.
Barry Deutsch
