CEOs are often unimpressed by YouTube or Twitter.  Now, you might say “Well, that’s right and proper – Twitter is a tactical fad and not serious enough to warrant board time.”  But I disagree.  Twitter, the Twitter Culture and the Open Business movement are tightly linked and in some places Twitter is becoming synonymous with corporate change.

But for CEOs to lead on this, they need to be (a) seriously impressed (b) a little worried (c) ready to do something serious.

I maintain that avoidance and denial strategies dominate.  Firms don’t admit to these.  But they mask their denial and avoidance using the Monkey in the Basement strategy: allocate some resource to a junior to “do something” (undefined) on Twitter and let the world see that the Firm is “taking online seriously”.

So here’s my list of why social technologies should be treated as exceptional, different, and very challenging global phenomena:

  1. the majority are utterly free of charge to the user (free)
  2. they are widely available (ubiquitous in use)
  3. the cost of creating some of them is negligible (ubiquitous in production)
  4. they are easy to use (there are no manuals anymore)
  5. new features and new products come available daily (plentiful)
  6. they automatically change and upgrade, no one needs to upgrade (self-evolving)
  7. they work together – every product now provides links to other products as standard (connected)
  8. they give people tools which are more powerful than they have in the workplace (a reversal of prior years)
  9. they tend not to be feature-rich, complex or clever (simple)
  10. their value derives from the sheer numbers of people who connect and contribute content not from clever technology (mass)

The above nicked from our “Open Communications 23rd September 2009” thesis, but made poignant from the blank stare I received last week from one (unnamed) Chief Exec.