In a world bursting with information, customers, ironically, are feeling more distant than ever from the companies with which they do business.

The nonstop barrage of messages emanating from myriad sources has overwhelmed and alienated customers and created damaging rifts in relationships. But, technology, however much it has exacerbated the problem, also offers a solution by making it possible to leverage the intimacy that customers have always prized. New, swiftly evolving technologies can bridge the once formidable distance between individuals, including CEOs and customers. The advent of Wi-Fi, hand-held computing and ubiquitous social media is allowing CEOs to reach out to customers on a personal, real-time basis and has the potential to solidify relationships and fuel new growth. At a time when the public perception of CEOs is exceptionally low, savvy leaders are employing these tools in creative and innovative ways.

For example, in December 2006, when Marriott International’s new communications specialist approached her boss, J.W. Marriott Jr., she made a bold recommendation. “We’re going to have to do some blogs,” she told him. And like any self-respecting CEO at the time, Marriott responded, “What’s a blog?”

Now, more than three years later, the 77-year-old industry legend has earned a reputation for being a CEO at the leading edge of social media. Marriott began his blog (http://www.blogs.marriott.com/) in January 2007 and has been at it ever since. His monthly postings, on everything from climate change to immigration issues, are also available on the hotel chain’s Web site. Marriott has become a big proponent of the concept to other CEOs and senior executives.

“It’s a new way to communicate with people both inside as well as outside the company,” Marriott said. “It lets people get to know me, and it allows me to talk about things that are important to me and to the company.” For many customers, Marriott’s blog helps humanize what they might otherwise think of as just another big, global company.

His blogging notwithstanding, Marriott is an avowed Luddite, and he is quick to admit it. “I’m as far from a techie as you could possibly get,” said Marriott. “I don’t use any technology other than a telephone occasionally.” He dictates his blog into an MP3 recorder, and it is transcribed and edited before being posted. Despite his aversion to technology, Marriott loves the payoff. “We’ve booked $2 million worth of room sales from the blog this year,” he said. “We did $3 million last year, so I have to get my scores up in 2010.”

THE NEW DIGITAL ORDER

By now, even the newest technology no longer feels leading edge. The pace of innovation has created a society, from baby boomers to millennials, ever ready to line up for the next new thing. Technology shifts come in mighty waves that overwhelm whatever stood before and put new tools and opportunities into the hands of eager users. But most CEOs remain aloof from technology. In fact, what has remained constant over the past three decades is the reluctance of most chief executives to embrace the use of technology themselves. As the PC revolution grew in intensity, for example, few CEOs actually used computers, preferring to channel their communications through surrogates. Now, CEOs are certainly using more hand-held devices and even laptop computers, but most have kept their distance from social media. That course must now change, according to technology and business strategy consultants.

George F. Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research, a research firm based in Cambridge, Mass., laid out the situation in his own blog (http://blogs.forrester.com/colony/) about CEOs and technology. “Digital will be mandatory, not a choice,” Colony wrote. “Pre-digital CEOs could get away with IT/BT [information technology/business technology] ignorance. No longer. Tech will be key to how you sell, connect to customers, become more efficient and lower costs.”

Colony’s assessment is persuasive. It is clear that 2009 was a year in which all the technology pieces — mobile computing, broadband and social media — merged into a coherent trend with strong momentum.

Consider:

Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site, reached more than 350 million users around the world, and 70 percent of those were outside the United States.

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 20 percent of Internet users use Twitter, a real-time messaging Web site. That is up from 11 percent in April 2009 and growing quickly. Twitter is playing an increasingly influential role in business, politics and other areas once reserved for traditional media.

There are tens of millions of blogs posted on the Internet, and thousands more appear daily. Though most have limited impact, there are a growing number of blogs that wield significant influence on industries and markets. There are also wikis, Webcasts and podcasts, and the tidal wave of user-generated media has not yet crested.

There are an estimated 140 million user-generated videos posted on YouTube, and these videos are viewed an estimated 1.7 billion times a day around the world.

Yankee Group Research forecast that by 2011, annual expenditures for online advertising would top $50 billion, representing more than 25 percent of all media consumption.

The younger generations that use social media represent a vast marketplace. But the median age of Facebook users has leaped from 26 in May 2008 to 33, and it is clear that baby boomers as well have flocked to Facebook in huge numbers since 2008. The median age of a Twitter user is 31; MySpace, 26; LinkedIn, 39.

Most important, according to a survey from eWeek.com, 94 percent of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investments in social media tools like blogs, wikis and microblogs. 

As Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy, a business consulting firm, recently wrote, “2009 will go down as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media, and mainstream adoption began at the speed of light.” As the new decade gets under way, wise CEOs are paying attention.

Although many large and small businesses continue to wrestle with planning and carrying out their individual strategies, all have become focused on the reality of a new and powerful technology platform. Get on board or be left behind. The desktop PC revolution, networking, the advent of the Internet, broadband and mobile computing have all moved from innovation to table stakes in quick succession.

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Not surprisingly, the largest companies are often the slowest to react to technological trends. According to several surveys, the Fortune 500 companies have been reluctant to offer corporate blogs, with little more than 15 percent producing some type of blog. A 2009 survey by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth of Inc. magazine’s 500 fastest-growing private companies revealed that 45 percent described social media as a critical part of their business strategy.

However, large companies are hardly technology-averse. Most senior executives in these organizations depend on mobile computing devices, whether it is a BlackBerry or an iPhone, as the foundations of their personal work spaces. Robert A. Lutz, the 77-year-old former vice chairman of General Motors, gained wide recognition for posting a candid blog called FastLane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/), starting in 2005. After blogging for a short time, Lutz became a strong proponent of the medium. “What began as an experiment has become an important means of communication for G.M.,” Lutz wrote. “It has given me, personally, an opportunity to get much closer with you, the public.” He is still blogging regularly today.

THE HOLDOUTS

Yet one group has stubbornly resisted forward movement. As Colony said, CEOs have long eschewed technology and continue to believe they can remain distant, if not isolated, from it. Most believe that hands-on involvement in technology-related activities is unnecessary, time-consuming and an ineffective use of their time and skills. During its recent massive vehicle recall, Toyota Motor Corporation relied almost exclusively on 20th century technology — newspaper and television advertisements — to try to reassure its customers. Both its Japan-based CEO and its U.S. chief ignored social media options and Web-based opportunities to create a more intimate connection to customers.

CEO bloggers, especially outside the high-tech sector, remain rare. The few who do blog tend to be egotists who enjoy having their personal views displayed for the world to see, according to Colony. Most have not embraced the potential benefits of social media because the relentless pressures of the economic downturn have forced them to concentrate on the fundamental issues of their jobs.

“Their primary job is to optimize business, take on the big issues, and they don’t have time to blog,” said Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and author based in Framingham, Mass. (http://gillin.com/blog/). But Gillin added that CEOs must be communicators, and more are beginning to recognize the power of social media to have an impact on a market and a business sector. Marriott has emerged as an exception, and the payoff to his blogging is not only increased business but transparency. “I find that the most successful blogs are the personal ones,” Marriott said.

Marriott acknowledges that he writes no more than half his blogs himself but insists he personally approves the blogs he does not write. He has not shied away from controversial issues, and the blog posts include comments, both negative and positive, from readers. Indeed, through this new customer-driven communication option, Marriott is facing the company’s critics head-on and retaining an opportunity to respond in a timely manner. The alternative is to allow the customers to set the agenda.

“You have to be credible,” Marriott said. “If you just put out softball stuff, people will look at it and never look again. People ought to have an opinion about what’s going on in the world. If we can get them to voice their opinions, great. It helps give credibility to the blog.”

While there is no doubt that CEOs must grapple with severe time constraints, it appears that the marketplace has reached a tipping point at which forward-thinking CEOs will embrace the technology today, even as the vanguard of next-generation leaders who were raised with keyboards in their hands prepare to ascend to top positions. Although most chief executives at large corporations continue to rely on their internal communications and public relations people to get their messages out to the public, CEOs in small companies, particularly start-ups, are diving into social media already.

“In a start-up, it’s almost a requirement for the CEO to use social media,” Gillin said. “The CEO needs to be a visionary and has to communicate that vision. They use blogs to go straight to the public with their message.”

Ira Deutchman, a managing partner of Emerging Pictures in New York, has been a producer, distributor and exhibitor of independent films for 34 years. During an award-winning career, he has worked on more than 150 films, including some of the most successful independent films of all time. Emerging Pictures, founded in 2001, puts digital projectors and servers into existing underused performance spaces like museum auditoriums. The company also acts as the intermediary between the theaters and independent distributors to deliver the content over the Internet.

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Not surprisingly, Deutchman is comfortable around technology and is an avid user of Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. “I spend 80 percent of my time on e-mail,” he said. “My e-mail inbox is my to-do list.” He has also had his own blog for a couple of years and it has spawned followers (http://iradeutchman.com/wordpress/).

Deutchman noted that the technology has allowed Emerging Pictures to remain trim and efficient in its use of staff and resources. Traditional marketing and public relations are still important, but the shift is clearly toward digital. The feeling here is that if we are going to be investing the time and effort into anything, it should be electronic,” Deutchman said.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

Lois Paul, the co-founder and president of Lois Paul & Partners, a high-tech public relations firm in Woburn, Mass., began her blog three years ago with a clear commitment (http://loispaul.typepad.com/). She decided that rather than use them for self-promotion, the blogs would focus strictly on communication.

“One of the reasons we started the blog initially was that it was becoming such an important piece of the communications strategy that the only way we could counsel our clients appropriately was to do it ourselves,” Paul explained. “We have client CEOs doing blogs now.”

In more traditional organizations, CEOs who embrace the new technologies are gaining increased visibility. Paul Levy, the 59-year-old president and chief executive officer at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is among the most popular bloggers in the health care industry. He is such a big proponent of social media that he blogs daily at (http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/), and he is followed by thousands of readers. “It’s addictive,” Levy said. He is also active on Facebook and finds himself receiving instant messages or Facebook posts from the 20-something employees at the hospital. “They don’t use e-mail,” Levy said. “They text.” For Levy, the rise of social media has been a surprising boon, providing powerful new tools for heightening his organization’s profile.

Levy pointed out that the increasingly competitive health care marketplace has forced hospital administrators to rethink their communications strategies. “It’s fair to say that if we tried to invent for our hospital a way of having a broad public relations campaign telling people what we are doing in terms of improving quality and safety using traditional means, we would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and we wouldn’t have had the outreach.”

During economic slowdowns, companies that hope to emerge not just intact but in competitively advantageous positions tend to adopt new technology-based strategies, as the airlines and communications industries have done.

The most discerning chief executives find opportunity when others get stuck in straitjackets. Levy initiated his blog in 2006 because he thought it would be fun to write. But he soon availed himself of a new opportunity. He has become a widely heard voice in the national debate about health care reform and an extensively read blogger. The blog, in fact, has become a potent recruiting tool. “My doctors and nurses tell me that when they go to international conferences and they say they are from Beth Israel Deaconess, people respond by saying, `Oh yeah, that’s where the president has a blog. I’ve been reading what you are doing and it’s really fascinating.’ As an avenue for professional peer outreach, it’s been incredibly successful.”

This high-level transparency has made it easier to recruit top professionals in the medical field because people already have a good idea about Beth Israel’s culture and work environment. In fact, one remarkable moment became an international news story because of e-mail, the Internet and Levy’s blog.

In March 2009, facing a severe budget shortfall in the midst of the economic crisis, Levy realized that the hospital would have to lay off about 600 employees. At a meeting with hospital employees in the center’s auditorium, Levy suggested that the top wage earners, including himself, might consider sacrificing salary and benefits in order to prevent lower wage earners from losing their jobs. As the words left his mouth, the employees rose to their feet and cheered. He told the gathering that he was going to set up an online chat room so people could share suggestions about how to address the crisis. “I got thousands of messages,” Levy said. The hospital’s 13 department heads urged their fellow doctors to agree to give up a percentage of their salaries and quickly accumulated pledges of $350,000 to help avoid the layoffs.

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A columnist for The Boston Globe learned of Levy’s actions and wrote about it. The response was immediate and electronic. More than 14,000 readers e-mailed the story to friends, and it was picked up by Yahoo, which put it on its home page. Millions read the story there, and soon NBC, ABC and PBS sent news crews to the hospital. More than 15 million more viewers saw it. Levy said that the good will engendered by the story was incalculable. “The story spread well beyond what I ever imagined,” he said. “It all multiplies and combines.” Some people say the Web is viral, “and it is,” he said.

The Beth Israel story illustrates the best reason for CEOs to welcome this wave of social technology. For CEOs in every industry, there are important trends emerging around technology. According to Forrester Research:

•Customers will look very unfamiliar. A 2008 Forrester report noted: “They will learn, play, work and live differently than you or the customers you studied in business school. In the United States, 18- to 27-year-olds spend 30 percent less time reading magazines and newspapers than 28- to 40-year-olds. They spend twice as much time playing digital games, 53 percent more time on cell phones and twice the amount of time on social sites like Facebook. You may not like it and you may not understand it, but your customer is being changed by technology.”

•The competition for people will be intense. As baby boomer professionals begin to retire, companies will be forced to use technology as a lure for highly desirable employees. “Attracting and winning the best and the brightest takes world-class offices and factories, the best internal technology and truly compelling corporate purpose and values,” according to Forrester. Social networking is the context in which the younger generations see the world, said Colony, the CEO of Forrester. “This is the water they swim in,” he said.

•Innovation as it has been known is dead. Customers, using social media and technology, “will be active participants in broad aspects of product development.”

•Today’s leading companies will be replaced. “New companies (and therefore new elites) will aggregate around three areas: 1) new health care, 2) new forms of energy and 3) technology. As CEO, you’ll have to drop your connections to the dying elites and figure out how to form connections to the emerging ones.” Being a technology-adept, engaged CEO will be a major competitive advantage to this end.

Lichtenberg predicted:

•Expect that all the disparate pieces of social media — the Web, mobile computing, TV, video, blogs and Twitter — will soon merge into a “single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices.”

•Expect a surge in adoption of social media at product, services and solutions companies.

•Return on investment for social media is going to matter, and measurements in dollars are starting to emerge.

CONCLUSION

Although CEOs have generally resisted a personal connection with technology over the past several decades, you are on the cusp of a new era of CEO participation. The next generation of corporate leaders will consider technology as basic as oxygen within their organizations and as affording an opportunity to create customer intimacy at little or no extra cost. Until that shift occurs, there is an opening for current top executives to get ahead of the pack and claim the digital landscape for their own.

As Marriott said: “The key to leadership, especially when times are tough, is communication. When things are not good, you have to communicate all the time. This is one way to lead. I’m getting something from it. And it’s fun.”