As we conclude our business, we joke about what would happen if we tweeted about the meeting. It’s immediately apparent that there is nothing that we could say even if we were remotely serious.
“I’ve always thought of Twitter as a waste of time,” he says.
“Now I realise that even if I simply tweeted, ‘having a coffee with Ann-Maree
Moodie’, there would be a number of people who may surmise the reason for the
meeting. So even for company directors just tweeting that you’re meeting with
someone could be market-sensitive or could become material. It’s a
game-changer.”In the conservative world of company boardrooms, the notion of directors signing up to Twitter and having followers is incongruous. But as I’ve argued in a previous post, (“Should Company Directors be on Facebook?”), I believe it is important for board members to be active in social media in order to understand firsthand how it works.
Businesses are changing rapidly to take advantage of this new consumer-led transactional world and company directors need to have the right language in order to participate in discussions and decision-making at the board table. And they need the experience to back up what they say.
But do they need to tweet about it?
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey as a free micro-blogging website. It was launched in August 2006 and became incorporated in May 2007. Since then the number of people who have signed to the site has grown exponentially.
The statistics about social media usage vary. The Pew Research Center in the United States, which is monitoring Internet usage by Americans, believes Twitter is used by 15% of adults who are already online, with eight per cent of these people using the site on a “typical” day. This figure compares with 13% of “online adults” using Twitter in May 2011 indicating that Twitter usage is steady. The small spike is attributed to the increase use of smart phones.
The word “twitter” was chosen as the name of the site quite deliberately – but it’s a word that has also given rise to the most common criticism levelled at it. The first name in contention was “twitch” because it is similar to sound a mobile phone makes when it vibrates. But it wasn’t quite the right choice. In the dictionary the word “twitch” lies not too far away from the word “twitter” which is defined as “short bursts of inconsequential information”. “And that’s exactly what the product was,” Dorsey, now the company’s executive chairman, wrote in a diary he kept during the website’s creation.[i]
For many critics, “inconsequential information” such as tweeting that you’ve just had a shower, called your girlfriend, or heated tomato soup in the microwave are all very good reasons not to sign up, to follow or to tweet.
Yet a small percentage of company directors and CEOs are signing on to Twitter, building a following and following others. Why?
Celebrities are the most successful members of Twitter – Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher. But Twitter isn’t just for popular and successful musicians, singers and actors. Political leaders such as US President Barack Obama and recently deposed French President Nicholas Sarkozy are on Twitter; religious leaders who tweet include the Dalai Lama. Some of the world’s biggest brands – Chanel, Rio Tinto, the NFL, the Ford Motor Company - use Twitter as a way to contact their customers directly.
Yet in the US, only 19 of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies are on Twitter and only four per cent are believed to have a Facebook page or a Linked In profile. A staggering 64% are not involved in social media at all.[ii] Among the few internationally-known CEOs who tweet are Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson and Meg Whitman. The statistics are extraordinary when compared with the number of people who use Facebook – 800 million active users.
I spoke with the few chairmen and company directors I know who use social media. The majority of these do very little: they have a Linked In account which they check irregularly. At the other extreme are the company directors who use Facebook and Linked In several times a week if not daily and have also signed to Twitter.
Said one chairman: “I only use Facebook for family and close friends in order to share photos and send personal messages. I use Linked In to develop a range of business and professional contacts and align with groups of common interest. I use Twitter to follow regular messages from people, companies or the organisations that I follow. Only about 30% of my colleagues use Twitter or social media generally.”
I mention my conversation with the chairman who couldn’t see any benefit from using Twitter. She replies:“Twitter is a way to get a flow of information on areas of interest. It can be used in a one off way to refer the user to more detailed information or it can be used for a free flowing conversation. As a company director you might be referred to something you might not otherwise know about or you can observe how conversations twist and turn and get a feel for how that could impact on your companies.”
Is it negligent of company directors not to tweet, then?
In the world of Twitter there are those who tweet and those who follow. By far the majority of people are followers, using the service to “listen in” to “conversations”. But for those who tweet, or who wonder what they might tweet, examples abound.
Rupert Murdoch tweets on topics ranging from local and international politics to business. “Bigger problem than Afghanistan is Pakistan - broken state with lots of nuclear bombs. No- one knows future,” Murdoch tweeted on July 11. The same week Bill Gates was collecting book recommendations. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard regularly tweets when she’s on the road although every word is countered by her array of “fake Julias”.
What to tweet and when to tweet it is a matter of common sense for a company director. There is a happy compromise to be achieved by participating in Twitter in order to learn and to experience how so much of the world chooses to communicate today while still maintaining an appropriate level of decorum, discretion, grace and confidentiality.
Tweeting from a board meeting is an obvious example of what a company director shouldn’t and wouldn’t do. In short, any piece of information that should remain confidential shouldn’t be tweeted.
But Twitter could be used to comment on a company’s new product, the appointment of a new CEO or to cheer on a cause that the company supports.
A board charter could be written outlining what directors and the company believe are appropriate ways that directors may choose to participate on Twitter. This document should make clear the purpose of directors using social media, outline the risks associated with such activity and the ways in which these risks can be corralled.
Said a chairman I interviewed: “All companies I am involved with have a risk strategy and a wide range of risks are discussed. But it is evolving just like the media itself. The biggest issue is keeping watch on what is being said and reacting quickly.”
