Analysis Of Adam Elman's Profile As An Influencer

Over the past decades, there has been a growing number of public awareness regarding the role of the organizations in society. What is the main goal of an organization? Isn’t only to gain profit? According to Charles Handy, a company is not just about making a profit. Rather, a company is doing a business because of the value that it has for the society and environment. Corporate social responsibility alludes to the idea whereby organizations incorporate such social and environmental worries in their business activities and in their association with their stakeholders on a discretionary basis. For professional in the corporate social responsibility world, creating and leveraging influence is about making a positive impact. It is crucial for these professionals to be visible and vocal as time is the essence in this arena. A lot of creative alternatives which these experts try to delivering the messages to the society and one of the most powerful approach is through social media. Commonly, also known as micro-blogging, many experts use Twitter to rapidly disseminate information and increase the awareness about their product or businesses. Twitter is one of the prominent ways where users can read, write and tweets about certain issues or news. According to the book of Twitter Tips, Tricks and Tweets, “Twitter is perhaps the simplest and most addictive social media tool of them all”. Furthermore, they also find Twitter as a good source of information and a great place for networking. One professional whom I have been following very closely on Twitter for the past three weeks is Adam Elman.

Adam Elman was a Head of Plan A Delivery for Marks & Spencer (M&S) and currently serves as Senior Lead for Sustainability in Amazon Europe. Whilst he came from Project Management and Change Management background, he has built an extensive career on sustainability for over 10 years. Project A was developed in 2008 and Adam was responsible to take charge of it. He had worked across M&S, suppliers and customers to build a healthier nation. His passion and commitment towards the program has brought him to the next level and thus, made him the Global Head of Delivery – Plan A & Sustainable Business. After the success of making M&S as the most sustainable retailer in the world, Adam was seized by the no 1 US Retail company – Amazon to lead and execute the sustainable strategy of this company across Europe. Like many influencers in the world, Adam is no exception and routinely uses Twitter as his communication channel to inform and engage with the public. Most of his tweets are addressing some elements of Sustainable Development Goals such as globalization, go green and clean water.

I did an analysis about his Twitter page via few social media tools and as a leader in Amazon, he is considered as an average Twitter user as compared to the people with the same experience and influence in the industry. Of the 200 tweets analyzed for the past 60 days, 189 were related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with the tweets mentioning #climatechange and sustainable as the most. Meanwhile, the average tweets per day were measured at 3. 49 and the number of followers that he has is 8000 Twitter users. My research suggests that most of his followers are average users where there is not much of great influence and there are only a fraction of his followers in the Twitter account has a great influential activity. I was taken aback with the number of his tweets that he tweeted in a day as compared to another leader in the industry. By comparison, Shane O’Connor who is a CSR professional at FedEx, tweets about 10 times a day on average. That is 50 percent more as compared with Adam’s tweets.

My observation suggests that most of Adam’s tweets merely taken directly from another source such as newspaper, articles, blogs or simply a retweet from someone else’s page. For an instance, one of his latest tweet, “London under threat of sinking as global warming sea levels rise, a new report finds” is a title of an article taken from Independent. co. uk. This suggests that there is lacking authenticity in terms of expressing his thoughts and poor engagement with the audience, hence the small number of retweets and reply that he received. Note that he has only 1 reply. Generally, the tone of his tweets is rather plain and dry. As opposed to other professional, they use their own words when tweeting and as a result, they received more replies, likes and retweets. Let’s take Erik Solheim who is the Head of UN Environment as an example. Stylistically, they are pretty similar; in a manner that the contents are informative and intellectual. However, Erik is more creative in a way that he uses Twitter as a platform not just to circulate information but also a place for an open discussion. His tone is more analytical and tentative. In addition to that, it has come to my attention on the source that Adam uses to tweet which is primarily came from The Guardian. Based on a statistic, The Guardian had an average daily circulation of 137, 839 on 2018, which is a drop of 8. 9 percent from last year, as compared to the circulation of 385, 346 for The Daily Telegraph.

The inclination of the sales of this particular newspaper suggests that less number of people interested to read from this source. When Amazon announced the minimum wage is to be increased to $15 starting November, it became one of the hot news in the US and UK. I was excited to check on his reaction on this, however, I was a little bit perplexed that he tweeted only twice for that day. Isn’t this is something to celebrate about? Yes, although perhaps there is no direct connection with social responsibility or sustainability, but rather as a leader in a company that practices sustainability, I personally feel he is not doing enough to get attention and engagement with the public. While other professionals especially those who were attached directly and indirectly with Amazon were spamming their Twitter with hashtag #Amazon15, Adam on the other hand only had 2 tweets pertaining to the current news. While he could have used this chance to gain more followers and get public attention by tweeting, perhaps he prefers to be more reserved that day.

Overall, from the observation done to Adam, he probably could enhance his writing style and networking by making it more compelling than his current tweeting style. Perhaps he could use more hashtags, attached more attractive media file to capture reader’s attention pertaining to sustainability activity and be an active Twitter user so that it will look more engaging and lively. It is essential to engage with other Twitter users to grow one’s influence and to be more reachable to the public. Based on my analysis, his tweets get less number of retweets and likes not just because of poor networking but also due to the tweets that he tweeted is mostly just an affirmation of the same topic from weak sources. Besides, the followers that he has are mainly people with less influence, therefore, the circulation of his tweets are limited to his first-degree followers only and hardly reach second-degree users. Above all, it would be wise of him to be more diligently active in posting newsfeed on his Twitter and bring Amazon to another level with his influence.