Should You Be Social?

I don’t have a ‘real’ website. Initially it was because I was too busy delivering for clients to focus on building one, and then it became an interesting experiment. Do you really need a website to do business?
 
I do own www.paulwriter.com but the URL redirects to my blog which has one post on my business. On the other hand I have 1000+ connections on LinkedIn, 250+ senior marketers are members of a by-invitation-only Roundtable I host on LinkedIn, hundreds of friends are connected to me on Facebook, 2190 followers on Twitter and a regularly updated blog. I also speak and write at relevant forums. This seems to make me sufficiently accessible by those who wish to do business with me, and provide sufficient channels to talk about my firm’s offerings.
 
Clearly, social media is effective in building a personal brand and in communicating a business’ value. This is probably why marketers around the world drove their CEOs on to various social media channels – most prominently Twitter – last year. Here’s a quick look at how successful they have been in attracting followers, that is, those interested in receiving their updates:
 
Michael Dell (www.twitter.com/michaeldell) - 2800+ followers
Bill Gates (www.twitter.com/billgates) - 899,499 followers
Vijay Mallya (www.twitter.com/thevijaymallya) - 75,000+ followers
Anand Mahindra (www.twitter.com/anandmahindra)- 55,000+ followers
S.    Sivakumar (www.twitter.com/s_sivakumar), CEO or ITC’s Agri Division - 930 followers
Suresh Vaswani (www.twitter.com/sureshvaswani), Wipro Jt CEO - 673 followers
S.    Gopalakrishnan (www.twitter.com/kris_sg) of Infosys - 469 followers
Vineet Nayar (www.twitter.com/vineetnayar) of HCL - 868 followers
 
 
With the exception of Michael Dell, none of the other CEOs are equally active across LinkedIn, Blogs, Facebook. President Obama, the master of harnessing social media for branding was present not just on all of the above sites but also YouTube and MySpace.
 
I think that in order to benefit from social media, you need to be present in all the places that matter, and ensure that your digital presence is neatly connected both to itself and your offline presence.
 
The second, important point is that your social media presence needs to be ‘social”. Who would have thought that Bill Gates was a big fan of Ryan Seacrest (of American Idol fame) or of pop sensation Ashley Tisdale? But among the just 52 accounts he follows, these stand out amongst all the expected ones like Davos or Ted. Anand Mahindra and Vijay Mallya run a vibrant conversation with their followers and covers current events, sports, opinions. S. Sivakumar also interacts well with his followers, but the CEOs of Infosys and Wipro prefer to be just outbound and rarely respond to comments.
 
Now the whole point of social media is to be social. To make friends. To interact and gain first-hand knowledge of what others think about you and your firm. Brand-building should only be a secondary objective. And if the only aim is to share info about your firm, then you may as well stick to web-updates or even good old email. The God of Indian cricket, Sachin Tendulkar runs a surprisingly personal Twitter account and is using it to promote his charities. Why can’t more CEOs manage this? Ah, because there is a difference between being God and being CEO (it would be good for CEOs to remember this more often!)