CEOs conquer social media: the new mission awareness of company bosses
CS boss Thiam denies media reports via Instagram, other bosses give insight into their private lives: After a long absence, Swiss company leaders discover social media. However, going on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn also harbors risks.
In the worst case, what can happen if the CEO of a large company independently runs an account on Instagram or Twitter? And what is the best possible case? There is an answer to both questions: Elon Musk. The founder of electric car maker Tesla is Donald Trump’s economy. He tweets every day, uncontrolled, unimpressed by his communication experts, what is going through his mind.
On good days, he spontaneously announces a million donation on his account for a tree planting campaign by a 21-year-old YouTube filmmaker and thus generates a multiple of the sum in the form of attention for his company. On bad days, he unsubstantially claims to take his company off the stock exchange and is trading a $ 20 million fine from the US stock exchange regulator. Musk just keeps going. As CEO of Tesla, he has become a brand himself. He is no longer dependent on the traditional mass media to be heard. And if he tweets, they report anyway.
In Switzerland, company heads have shunned the unpredictable world of social media for a long time and are only beginning to approach the not really new form of communication. According to a survey by the PR network Ecco, every fifth CEO of the 20 largest listed companies in the country had a Twitter account last summer, almost two-thirds had a profile on the less exposed career platform LinkedIn (see graphic below).
On the unrecognized platforms Facebook and Instagram, the numbers are likely to be significantly lower. However, the Swiss do not have to shy away from the global comparison. Only in the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark and France was the rate of “social CEOs” higher. When the Swiss company bosses post something, it is mostly innocuous: selfies with employees, blog articles about new products or links to annual reports, rarely also selected insights into private life. The main thing is nothing controversial.
How the Credit Suisse boss said about media scolding
The astonishment among communication experts was all the greater when Credit Suisse boss Tidjane Thiam used his Instagram account, which had only been opened a few days ago, to criticize “false and reputation-damaging reports in the Sunday press” in his view. A remarkable process for the head of a large Swiss company.
On the one hand, due to the channel used: Instagram, with its billion users, is no longer just popular with teenagers, but is still mainly used as a platform for holiday photos, party pictures and influencers. Not as a communication channel for the bosses of large Swiss companies; Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan excluded.
On the other hand, it is unusual for company bosses to attack traditional media such as newspapers or television stations with their personal social media account. If CEOs feel unfairly treated, they rely on their communications departments to send armored emails to the editors-in-chief, asking for a discussion or counter-notification. Before Tidjane Thiam, direct confrontation with a classic medium was sought only by his competitor and UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti in January 2019 – it stayed this one time.
Nevertheless, the question arises whether Thiam and Ermotti’s personally criticized press are at the beginning of a larger development. Is the era of “social CEOs” dawning in Switzerland?
The CEOs can bypass the critical mass media
Christian P. Hoffmann, Professor of Communication Management at the University of Leipzig, knows the Swiss situation. “In the past, there was no way around the press if you wanted to reach a mass audience,” he says. That is different today. He observed “a clear increase in CEOs with their own presence on social media”. A younger, more social media-savvy generation is pushing into the executive floors.
For them, the advantage of platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn is that there is no longer a filter between the company and the audience. In other words, there is no critical reporting. However, there are also disadvantages. “Corporate and CEO social media accounts don’t achieve the same reach as mass media. They still rely on the classic media. »
From a corporate communications perspective, Twitter-happy CEOs are also a risk, according to Hoffmann. Especially when the boss sends unspoken tweets and other social media posts. He cites Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser as an example, who regularly expresses himself in a focused manner on social and political issues, but with his tweets also unintentionally triggered waves of outrage and also had to apologize again via Twitter.
The until recently most active Swiss Twitter CEO has largely withdrawn from social media: through his spokesman, the retiring SBB boss Andreas Meyer says that he is now mainly restricting himself to tweets from other accounts. “This was a deliberate decision with the goal of generally reducing the time spent on media consumption and spending more of this time on personal contacts.” However, the trend points in a different direction.
Positive influence of tweets on the share price
The magazine of the renowned business department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a positive correlation between business-related tweets from CEOs and the market price of the respective company in 2016: If the causal connection actually exists, investors reacted with stock purchases especially when the CEOs mentioned new factories , Announced investments in the workforce or presented new products.
The prospect of price gains and the uncritical environment should in the future still lead one or two company bosses to open a social media account. (Aargauerzeitung.ch)
