New Social (media) Man

The McKinsey Quarterly, gives solace to retired execs;

With video cameras achieving near ubiquity and film clips uploading in the blink of an eye to YouTube or other platforms.... video communication rises in importance, effective leadership will increasingly require the kind of creative skills we know from the world of “auteur” filmmaking—an authentic voice, imagination, and the ability to craft compelling stories and to turn them into media products that make people take note and “lean forward.” To engage in real time on a personal level, executives will also need the technical skills to master the basics of digital-multimedia production, including how to shoot and, if necessary, edit videos.

....Business leaders have traditionally disseminated information along a controlled, linear chain that begins after the development of a formal meaning-creation process—think of how your company creates and distributes memos explaining new initiatives. While traditional distribution pathways won’t disappear, social media revolutionizes the standard information process by reversing it. Social communication makes distribution the starting point and then invites company audiences to cocreate and contextualize content to create new meaning. Messages are rebroadcast and repurposed at will by recipients who repost videos, retweet and comment on blogs, and use fragments of other people’s content to create their own mash-ups.

As the (vertical) broadcast media and the (horizontal) participatory media converge, leaders need to master the interplay of two fundamentally different paradigms: those of the traditional channels, which follow the logic of control, and of the new channels, where it is essential to let the system’s dynamics work without too much direct intervention. Since executives won’t be able to govern or control a message once it enters the system, they must understand what might cause it to go viral and how it may be changed and annotated while spreading through the network. Distribution competence—the ability to influence the way messages move through complex organizations—becomes as important as the ability to create compelling content. 

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