The local business follows that aren’t connected organizationally are a huge problem. I follow a local health food store. “What’s Twitter?”, “We have a twitter account?” That news sent two people bouncing off in different directions scratching their heads until the “guy in charge of Twitter” was found. After less than 30 seconds I could see he was not at all interested in learning anything about how to use Twitter (as evidenced by his once a month tweets, virtually no followers and not following anyone). What’s worse is that he looked terribly disinterested with the links I gave him to this site and one or two others so he could get a clue. That piece of paper probably wound up in the garbage.

So the question I have isn’t so much “Does Your CEO Know What You’re Doing?” but does the person assigned to create and maintain a company Twitter account know what he or she is doing?

Having worked in that field many years myself, I know very well how you can lead a horse to water, but not make him drink. From face-to-face meetings, to print newsletters, e-mail, intranets, internal blogs and services like Yammer, the best large organizations can do is make the content available in multiple formats and hope that employees engage with at least one of them.

For instance, it was so sad to see in the Deloitte study (2009 Ethics & Workplace Study) that more employees had created a corporate Facebook page (18%) than companies had (11%). This is one of the first things that companies should have done. However they blindly watched this opportunity pass them by as they wondered why they have a gossip problem, a moral problem, or a recruiting problem. A company’s leadership needs to be aware of these types of “technological” advances and be able to use them to grow the company. Otherwise you should probably sell your shares of their stock.

Great post!

Let me ask you, do you think there’s any way big companies can keep abreast of what the other parts of the organization are doing in not through emails and internal blogs? There has to be SOME way to brief them and help solve the disconnect.