How to pitch social media to your boss

If your CEO is still on the sidelines, try these tactics to get him or her into the game

There is no one formula for presenting social media to your company. The approaches will differ based on your position in the company, the company’s culture, formal presentation processes, and probably on the size of your company and the receptiveness of the industry to social media. But if you believe, as I do, that social media is here to stay and that your business can benefit from tapping into the social revolution, read on.

The pitch

It was 2008, and I was pitching social media to my company’s CEO.

It was lonely standing up there in the conference room. It was just the CEO, me and the glow of the projector displaying my PowerPoint presentation. But I knew that folding social media into the fiber of the company was the right path.

I presented the benefits and massive opportunities of social media, examples of other companies doing amazing things with it, and showed him Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Twitter stream to help him visualize what top-down involvement looked like.