Book Review - THE SOCIAL CEO - How Social Media Can Make You A Stronger Leader by Damian Corbet
READ: 4 mins
REVIEWER: Robert Craven
This book wasn’t quite what I expected. But that’s OK.
I was expecting a book by Damian.
Instead, I got a book of small chapters…all written by experts in their own field. So that is great. As Damian says, “it was a deliberate decision to aim for a wide mix of contributors and to mix things up.” So, what you get is multiple views, opinions and experiences.
The book starts off with a bang with a foreword by Brian Solis. He states the premise of the book, “Being a social CEO is simply an extension of tried and true leadership in the modern social age. Social CEOs use social technologies to lead us in a direction unified by the digital ties that bind us.” Boom!
The book has four main sections. You can read them in any order you like, or just choose the chapters that seem most relevant to you. However, at the start of the book is a few basic concepts, lest we forget how things have changed in the last few years….
From IT as a department to a fundamental foundation
From formal frameworks to collective communities
From ‘knowledge is power’ to lifelong learning
From listing to living brand values
From command and control to trusted authenticity
From there, the authors have just enough space to make their point before we move on to the next one. It is a like a series of TED talks, each one focusing on one aspect of the complex jigsaw. This makes it very readable and very digestible.
Here is the contents of the book:
Introduction Damian Corbet
PART ONE The Social Age
1 What is the Social Age? Sarah Goodall
PART TWO How can CEOs use social media?
2 Listening, engaging and leading Andrea Edwards
3 Personal branding for CEOs Tammy Gordon
4 How PR disasters are driving CEOs to embrace social media Bob Pickard
5 More than selling: Building social trust with your customers Chris Bartley
6 How social media can bring talent and opportunity to your door Nicola Brentnall
7 Internal engagement Euan Semple
8 Social leadership in small and medium businesses David Taylor
9 Why charity CEOs need to be on social media Zoe Amar
10 Living in glass houses: How the social CEO manages risk Martin Thomas
PART THREE Social CEOs in their own words
11 The sports sector Brett Gosper
12 The healthcare sector Julia Hanigsberg
13 The manufacturing sector Chris Mason
14 The charity sector David Barker
15 The insurance sector Jack Salzwedel
16 The social enterprise sector Jan Owen
17 The environmental sector Mark R. Tercek
18 The start-up sector Katie Elizabeth
19 The education sector Mary Curnock Cook
20 The B2B technology start-up Oliver Lawal
21 The tech sector Paul Frampton Calero
22 The municipal sector Charles Pender
23 The travel sector Tom Marchant
24 The small business owner Samantha Kelly
PART FOUR The future
25 Disrupt yourself Matt Ballantine
26 The role of technology Theo Priestley
27 The future of leadership Michelle Carvill
Conclusion Damian Corbet
I think you can dip into The Social CEO or read it cover-to-cover.
For me, the chapters that stood out were on Personal Branding and Building Social Trust.
The chapters that closed with tips were a great bonus
e.g. “Internal Engagement
1 Go for it and engage fully in online conversations.
2 Become obsessively interested in the conversations that are taking place both inside your organization and outside on the web.
3 Learn to discern the difference between signal and noise.
4 Be ruthless in managing your time online and get better at making sure the return on investment (ROI) stacks up for you personally.
5 Spread the word and become an evangelist for this new and empowering way of working.”
e.g. “Social Leadership in Small and Medium Business
1 Ensure your business is digitally savvy and that you have some form of digital engagement strategy in place.
2 If you have to pick just one social media channel, make the most of LinkedIn. Master this and you can then think about using Twitter.
3 If you do want to dip your toe in Twitter, use it as a newsfeed first without engaging.
4 Think about what you need to do to become a thought leader. What have you got to say, what issues do you want to talk about and how could you represent your company as a brand ambassador?
5 Learn from those around you —even the youngest members of your team.”
Of course, some parts are, and will be seen to become, more time sensitive than others.
It was a clever strategy to focus on a series of sectors. That way you can immerse yourself on a sector specific case study or learn from others.
And hats off to Damian for creating a book with a decent index and footnotes—it drives me mad when you can‘t isolate a subject via the index or search out a quoted piece of research.
In the conclusion he quotes Julian Stodd, in a sentence that actually delivers a fair summary of the book and its intention, “Social leadership isn’t an optional extra: it’s a method and mindset for engaging in communities and deploying the power of your organization, that liberates innovation and creativity. Organizations that lack this power will feel increasingly less relevant in the Social Age.” Spot on. And CEOs need something like this to refer to and use as the nudge to get them out there.
The whole book echoes words like transparent, open, honest, engaged, community-minded. This is leadership in the 21st century. I am sure plenty of leaders, feeling slightly on the edge, will be buying this book and keeping it hidden in their desk, not sure whether to buy-in or abstain from joining their peers. Social CEO should and will reassure them to be brave and bold.
Yes, the book is not bang up-to-date. Yes, it doesn’t talk about Covid. But it contains the principles and approaches that someone who is not totally tech-savvy needs. A digital native may scoff that a book must explain almost how to live in this decade, but the book is not aimed at them.
It is aimed at CEOs trying to up their game. People trying to sort out the fact from the fiction. Trying to not be out-of-date and yet not make a fool of themselves in front of the board. For them, this book will be like a well-thought-out and well-constructed instruction manual when 99% of webinars and courses claim to make you a millionaire or your money back. This is not for those wanting the silver bullet or the quick win. It is for those who want to understand what they are letting themselves in for and the opportunities and pitfalls that may lay ahead.
This may be the book that agency owners should give to every one of their clients. And their clients’ board of directors… It is so rare to find a book on social media that is free of touchy-feely nonsense. One that a grown-up can read. A breath of fresh air.