I was just reading the blog post by Mike Wise on getting executives to “buy in” to social media  – and it made me think to post up my thoughts on this here as it is something I deal with all the time.

I spend a lot of time with executives talking about social media. And I am often brought into board rooms to help the executives understand what social media is and look at it to see if  it can help them in their particular field.

To get the “buy in” (I don’t like that word, but it fits the bill), I feel I need to look at it from their perspective. I take time to show them that there are good ways to use these things – and the four pillars – blogging, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – are simply tools that will make it easier to communicate with other people. Just like when websites came in. Or emails became the norm. Or Blackberrys took over the insurance world. Continue reading →