High Performance Boards

CHAPTER 25Boards and Social Media¹

Certainly not a specialist of social media myself, I have discovered how much board members can learn from stepping out of their usual and sometimes dated ways. The extra effort to understand the evolution of the social and business environment through the social media lens is immensely rewarding and the tools available truly productive. Better learned individuals such as Estelle Metayer,² whose lectures and insights have inspired this chapter, can guide us towards better mastery of content.

In general, boards spend little time thinking about social media, and many directors are still accustomed to more formal and structured sources of news and information. But social media is increasingly a way of life and is fundamentally changing the way people interact and communicate – including by democratising the world's information and revolutionising the way we do business. As of the first quarter of 2019, Facebook had 2.38 billion monthly active users. Daily in 2019, 500 million tweets are posted on Twitter and 5 billion videos are viewed on YouTube.

Social media is not only a way to share information, but also a forum for conversations among consumers and activists that can derail and destroy company reputations. Social media are transforming the context the business works in, such as employees to management relations. Even further, for the astute board member, social media present a fantastic source of information on the company, its context, ...