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As an executive you have many priority calls to make. For some time most have postponed development of personal networked Leadership skills. The power of the social and mobile movement in society makes such a move a high risk call going forward. Markets will move along anyway and your new skills are not developed overnight so you better start as early as possible.

A multitude of strong reasons hold back most Executives from adopting social and mobile. We start as digital immigrants with limited knowledge of social platforms for professional purposes. We are dealing with sensitive information on a continuous basis and are cautious not to cause any leaks. We have been unclear over the business value of social media initiatives. Last but not leased we are busy and divide have little spare time to dedicate to the social mobile agenda. Most of these excuses we give ourselves miss the reality we face:

“We don’t have a choice in doing social and mobile; the choice is in how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman (The Digital Dale Carnegie)

Our customers have started or will soon adopt social and mobile. “Mobile First” strategies and priorities reign across all industries. Our partners and competitors will move along with or without us, and we have to take a follower role in the market. Our employees are already on social media, they connect and learn daily what works and what doesn’t.

As a current adopter of social and mobile for professional purposes you can look forward to the following benefits:

• Learn the new social mobile landscape before your customer does – otherwise you are bound to only react to their new demands
• Expand your sphere of influence into the social mobile domain – many of your new customers and partners you will not meet in person.
• Know enough to lead your employees – you don’t have to be best but you need to know enough to lead social mobile centric initiatives.
• Build your digital brand before you need it – in the past leaders resumes and reputation were the base for recruitments. In the future your digital presence will define your personal brand.

Good questions to start working with in this area are:

• What is holding me back from starting today? – Most obstacles are easier to drop than you think.
• What are the lowest hanging fruits I can capture? – Give yourself a chance to go for early easy wins
• Who in your organization can coach you to get started along the right track? – Look among your younger employees or your kids for coaches.

There are a loot of great reading available in this area:

• The state of Social @ Work: The people’s perspective [INFOGRAPHIC] – by Mashable (@Mashable)
• The new rules of selling [SLIDES] – BY David Meerman Scott (@dmscott)
• The issue with Social media and Executives [BLOG] – by Dan Pontefract, Chief Envisioner, Telus
• Socialnomics 2014 [VIDEO] – by Eric Qualman, , The Digital Dale Carnegie (@Equalman)
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube [eBOOK] – by Erik Qualman
• There is no B2B or B2C: It is Human-to-human #H2H [eBOOK] – by Bryan Kramer

As stated earlier we don’t have a choice if to do this. It is a question of how good we decide to become.