{"id":2455,"date":"2008-05-01T01:19:36","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T08:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/01\/coo-and-cfo-questions\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T03:20:09","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T10:20:09","slug":"coo-and-cfo-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/01\/coo-and-cfo-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"COO and CFO Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I spoke the executive team and business unit leads at a very large insurance company.  It was a long 4-hour session, where I gave a Groundswell presentation, discussed technographics, and gave specific case examples of their insurance industry and financial industry.  It&#8217;s not my job to evangelize social media, but to tell them about the benefits and risks, and how it impacts their business, or if it doesn&#8217;t.  <\/p>\n<p>As you&#8217;ve seen from my recent post, there <a href=\"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/26\/insurance-industry-explores-social-media-but-nothing-to-write-home-about\/\">are few successes in the insurance industry<\/a>. While every company must listen, the return on participating may not be right for every company and industry.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been doing these types of presentations since 2005, so I&#8217;m pretty used to the hurdle questions, and am always pleased to meet COO and CFO folks that have a solid business mind, and need to know how social media impacts business.    <\/p>\n<p>While many industries like tech, media and some consumer product companies have embraced this movement, many industries. If you&#8217;re going to be presenting to your executive staff or to clients, be prepared to answer the following questions, and back them up with data, examples, and insight, not just opinion:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Is this a fad?<br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s the future of these tools?<br \/>\nWhat are the costs and resources needed to do this?<br \/>\nDoes every employee need to participate?<br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s the legal ramifications?<br \/>\nWhat happens if we do nothing?<br \/>\nWhat are the risks if we engage?<br \/>\nHow do we measure success?<br \/>\nDoes this hurt or help customers?<br \/>\nHow does this increase revenues or reduce costs?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Simply put, the primary goal of business is about making money, so if you&#8217;re proposing a shift in resources, you better be able to back it up. It&#8217;s absolutely important that someone in the org challenges you, so you&#8217;ll need to be prepared.  Lastly, for what&#8217;s it&#8217;s worth, despite the tough questions, the COO mentioned to me during the break the workshop was going well, and he told me he was actually a techie too, I can&#8217;t wait to get a beer with him next time, smart guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I spoke the executive team and business unit leads at a very large insurance company. It was a long 4-hour session, where I gave a Groundswell presentation, discussed technographics, and gave specific case examples of their insurance industry and financial industry. It&rsquo;s not my &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/01\/coo-and-cfo-questions\/\" class=\"more-link\"><span>Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">COO and CFO Questions<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}