CEO’s “Take Back” Control of Social Media by Building Their Own Social Media Platforms

With the virus pandemic, racial outage and corporate product failures such as the 737Max (which is flying with limited plans to fly again), business reopening plans and being prepared for future weather and other internal or external, the new social CEO – reports of CEOs spending more than 50% of their time articulating and defending themselves and the company on public policy issues. They thought they had lobbyists but they are the chief lobbyist.  (Source: Fortune).  In addition, there are many surveys that viewers don’t trust or rather believe the news or content on Twitter, Facebook, and others that are mildly to overly “biased.”  True or not it’s time for companies and their leadership to “take back” control of meeting with their own social media platform for internal and external communications. 

Take Action Today: Delete all your public social media accounts and build your own separate internal and external social networks instead of all the toxic nonsense, mis/disinformation (anti-vaxers), weaponized media aka #hashtags , cyberbullies, shamers, haters, privacy violations, fake and deep fake which you cannot predict, you cannot react to all of this, you can only direct your own messaging. With your own 7×24 emergency management team aka crisis response reputation management team to address situations such as Boeing 737Max (internal), Target (terrorism and internal), Wells Fargo (both), BP (internal), Chipotle (supplier/unknown) and other corporate devastating consequences with 7×24 realtime “live” updates and demonstrating customer concern.

Why Now – Time is now to do a “fresh look” at customer internal and external content messaging. For example, an increasing number of CEOs are involved in company messaging and talk publicly to all stakeholders with their own message bypassing corporate communications and most importantly corporate gossip channels adding transparency, bringing closeness and clarity to the issues at hand.  In addition, the role of social media is to expand company leadership network including:

– Provide product “thought leadership”

– Engage with other industry “influencers”

– Engaging with CXO peers

– Bypass corporate organizational communications roadblocks

This kind of social media is not about any other social media platform, it is about building your own social communications platform.  Why, because you cannot control all the messaging that is found on other platforms.  Next, understand what are all the known and unknown communications “channels.” Channels are all the traditional including gossip and social media outlets that you can influence before the crisis because you certainly not influence anyone afterward – so get started now listen, connect, build trust, help them now so they help you later.

Realize your internal management including when they are “walking their dog” is  the most significant cause for crisis mismanagement.  As was found in one sales organization they felt there was “no need for its own crisis intelligence department because they deemed it an affront to its own sales strategy to allow its own strategic decisions to be influenced by what others might or might not be doing.”

Like in the movie Blade Runner, “reaction time is a factor” as you cannot predict competitive, hack attacks either in M&A, advances in tech or anything else, nor react to them, you can only direct customers to your content and thought leadership.  Also, remember the majority of cyber attacks come from disgruntled or dishonest employees, so the likelihood of the crisis coming from within is very high.  Your own platform allows the company to monitor and track internal communications, support “whistle-blowers” and reward for “see something, say something” efforts and continuous company communications. If you feel you must be on social media but remember you will be the target faster than you can read these words. Reaction time is a critical factor if you use other networks and if you can’t respond in less than 5 minutes 7×24 to any real or even fake news about you, then delete all your accounts.

CEOs and corporate leaders know that any kind of internal or external crisis will “kill the bottom-line.” Our research has also found an increasing number of customers spend a lot of time in before, during and after purchase in due diligence avoiding the RGE factor looking for thought leadership, crises and content useful in their purchasing as well as customer complaints regarding solutions.  For purposes of this presentation, terrorism are events perpetrated by others against you. Trust are events or efforts of goodwill, negligence or incompetency by you.

We call this platform “ultra AI” as it could over time incorporate artificial intelligence concepts such as found in MindMeld leading book on AI and could encompass issues like these:

•     Global issues such as climate/weather change

•     Emerging tech health and business trends

•     Industry outlook

•     Events and speaking tracking industry leaders

•     Competitive insights – protecting corporate IP-intellectual property and secrets

•     Social “street level” content curation

•     Voice of the “people” inside the business

Bottom-line – If you are not in total control of your media and media channel(s), you will find yourself succumbing to the messaging of others.

To get your own social media and video streaming platform email cross@gocross.com

 This mobile-ready application is a social media curation and content posting tool as well as live video streaming.
Key features:
– Capture Twitter feed from user
– Post via app Text, Images and Videos
– Repost to Twitter and Linkedin
– Provide Live Video Streaming for tens of thousands of viewers (using Vonage API) including sending video from front and back cameras. Note: Zoom and other meeting applications work for small group where interaction between members is vital, however, once you get above 50 and need 1-10,000 or 100,000+ viewers, streaming broadcast video is the solution needed.
– Future features include content “tabs” (topic sections), multiple users for single or multiple timeline posting (Twitter style), Video Recording, post directly via API to Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, single and bulk SMS messaging, etc.