Content experts at the top of the company
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 9:39 am
Digital success is not rocket science: Personal characteristics that count in offline business are also needed for digital success. Success always requires clarity, consistency, passion, drive, perseverance! This also applies to digital topics and especially to managers who communicate in social media: a clear target, a clear added value, without which it is not possible in online marketing to meaningfully reach the target group and thus sales targets.
Anything but classic PR ! For Finja Carolin Kütz, head of Oliver Wyman Germany, it is not particularly important whether bosses maintain their channels themselves or leave it to the social experts. All that counts is approachability, personal contributions and the transmission of the company culture.
How often have I experienced this in conversations with decision-makers from the B2B sector who (to put it mildly) have a rather unprogressive mindset when it comes to online marketing potential, when I mention keywords such as content marketing, my counterpart's mind shuts down. And in a flash, the interest is gone. The attention of my conversation partner is gone and the conversation digresses more or less impolitely to "now something really important".
For me, content experts belong at the top of companies. Period.
Why are insecure CEOs a problem?
Highly insecure bosses suffer greatly due to a lack of clarity, which they themselves are supposed to provide. And the challenges associated with digitalization contribute to further insecurity: According to a study, one in three managers in Germany is experiencing an identity crisis.
There is a lack of leadership in the implementation of digitization, said Schleswig-Holstein's Digital Minister Jan Philipp Albrecht in an interview with Handelsblatt. It is clear that Jan Philipp Albrecht, as a politician uae phone number data from the Green Party, is referring to politics. I also see the phenomenon primarily in medium-sized companies, where I lack leadership in digitization as well as an understanding of important sub-steps towards achieving goals. One example here is extremely outdated ERP systems that cannot be updated until far in the future due to a lack of understanding of the connections, a lack of manpower and unapproved budgets. But at the same time they are also not suitable, for example, for the new interface requirements. This blatantly slows down digitization projects. And all because of a lack of decisions based on a lack of understanding. Fatal.
There is a lack of a clear decision on direction, which cannot be defined by middle management within the framework of various partial digital projects. If, for example, a company cannot sell its goods itself because the management does not understand eCommerce , still holds on to the store and to long-standing but not very efficient trading partners who do not provide any usable data for measuring success and are also unable to scale sales growth, then there is a huge problem. There is a lack of a clear vision (in the example given: Where do we want to develop? We want to become an eCommerce company and are aiming for purely digitally induced sales.) - formulated and brought to life from the very top. This brings us back to the CEO, the management, the value mediators, the top management, the chairman or chairwoman of the board - in short: the personality who controls, leads, shapes the entire project and sets essential directional guidelines.
In connection with this, I miss the following questions in companies (and of course consistently thought-out strategies, concepts based on them and implementations with foresight)
Where should the journey go in terms of digital?
What does the company stand for and who communicates this attitude with clarity and emphasis?
Where do we want to develop as a company?
What role should employer branding play in this context?
Point 2 in particular is what I imagine a future CEO to be, and what characterizes a real content expert from the management team comes into play: No other personality is as prominent in the public eye as the CEO, as the role model for their company. And publicity primarily means social media. Classic corporate PR with texts and photos that serve the egos of top decision-makers is no longer sufficient here (decision-makers in suits shake each other's hands, decision-makers in suits look optimistically into the camera, etc. and yes, sadly it is very often white older men in suits, there is no diversity; but that is another topic for another post...).
Anything but classic PR ! For Finja Carolin Kütz, head of Oliver Wyman Germany, it is not particularly important whether bosses maintain their channels themselves or leave it to the social experts. All that counts is approachability, personal contributions and the transmission of the company culture.
How often have I experienced this in conversations with decision-makers from the B2B sector who (to put it mildly) have a rather unprogressive mindset when it comes to online marketing potential, when I mention keywords such as content marketing, my counterpart's mind shuts down. And in a flash, the interest is gone. The attention of my conversation partner is gone and the conversation digresses more or less impolitely to "now something really important".
For me, content experts belong at the top of companies. Period.
Why are insecure CEOs a problem?
Highly insecure bosses suffer greatly due to a lack of clarity, which they themselves are supposed to provide. And the challenges associated with digitalization contribute to further insecurity: According to a study, one in three managers in Germany is experiencing an identity crisis.
There is a lack of leadership in the implementation of digitization, said Schleswig-Holstein's Digital Minister Jan Philipp Albrecht in an interview with Handelsblatt. It is clear that Jan Philipp Albrecht, as a politician uae phone number data from the Green Party, is referring to politics. I also see the phenomenon primarily in medium-sized companies, where I lack leadership in digitization as well as an understanding of important sub-steps towards achieving goals. One example here is extremely outdated ERP systems that cannot be updated until far in the future due to a lack of understanding of the connections, a lack of manpower and unapproved budgets. But at the same time they are also not suitable, for example, for the new interface requirements. This blatantly slows down digitization projects. And all because of a lack of decisions based on a lack of understanding. Fatal.
There is a lack of a clear decision on direction, which cannot be defined by middle management within the framework of various partial digital projects. If, for example, a company cannot sell its goods itself because the management does not understand eCommerce , still holds on to the store and to long-standing but not very efficient trading partners who do not provide any usable data for measuring success and are also unable to scale sales growth, then there is a huge problem. There is a lack of a clear vision (in the example given: Where do we want to develop? We want to become an eCommerce company and are aiming for purely digitally induced sales.) - formulated and brought to life from the very top. This brings us back to the CEO, the management, the value mediators, the top management, the chairman or chairwoman of the board - in short: the personality who controls, leads, shapes the entire project and sets essential directional guidelines.
In connection with this, I miss the following questions in companies (and of course consistently thought-out strategies, concepts based on them and implementations with foresight)
Where should the journey go in terms of digital?
What does the company stand for and who communicates this attitude with clarity and emphasis?
Where do we want to develop as a company?
What role should employer branding play in this context?
Point 2 in particular is what I imagine a future CEO to be, and what characterizes a real content expert from the management team comes into play: No other personality is as prominent in the public eye as the CEO, as the role model for their company. And publicity primarily means social media. Classic corporate PR with texts and photos that serve the egos of top decision-makers is no longer sufficient here (decision-makers in suits shake each other's hands, decision-makers in suits look optimistically into the camera, etc. and yes, sadly it is very often white older men in suits, there is no diversity; but that is another topic for another post...).