¶ … awareness of the benefits of Social Media for leaders and their organizations. It revealed leaders' tendency to use Social Media to improve product awareness and promote strategic alliances with internal and external customers, foster new opportunities, and create an efficient branding strategy with a more effective approach to optimizing brand equity over time. The use of Social Media may be viewed as a form of product leadership, enabling leaders to adjust and fine-tune organizational direction to better suit the needs of customers and to more visibly offer products and services that maximize a company's profit and strengthen relationships. Leaders are able to connect to business partners and customers to gather perspectives, understand others in the same organizational domains, leverage information gathered through social networking sites for analytical decision support, and utilize results to competitively reshape businesses. The findings of this study indicated that leaders who have used Social Media brought new opportunities for conversation by sharing information in an online format, knowledge gathering, and relationship building as well as leveraged two-way communication. Also, leaders are able to create high performing and energizing climates, and are able to adapt their behavior to rapid environmental changes and enhance business effectiveness.

With Social Media, leaders are able to seek clarity and understanding within the framework of the consumer-producer discourse while cultivating teamwork and motivating others. Findings indicated that leaders reported that social media use had improved their personal leadership effectiveness within their organization. This study showed that social business activities could advance the strategic agenda of leadership and influence or change leadership styles. Improved personal leadership effectiveness inside and outside organizational structures was also evident.

This aspect of the study supports the contention that leaders who are transformational in their skill sets also have the ability to create a high level of shared task ownership. In today's organizations, leaders should be able to adapt the concept of learning by collaboration. While organizations focus on product development through collaborative innovation to dominate the marketplace, collaboration can help to increase the success and innovation of new products and to drive creativity and innovation. Collaboration...

The partnership among parties is typically based upon common ground and mutual respect. The goal of collaborative leadership is to gather resources, make these resources accessible, deliver results, reach milestones and overcome challenges.
The success and effectiveness of collaboration depends on establishing a strong partnership among parties, meeting targets, and accomplishing affirmative outcomes through an effective collaboration approach. The effective collaboration approach drives creativity and innovation, enhances knowledge and experience among parties, and increases the capabilities of organizations to generate new, innovative knowledge and strategies. From this perspective Social Media acts as a binding agent that can establish a link between various entities in a two-way communication flow.

Collaborative leadership within Social Media should be based on established trust among all parties. In order for leaders to succeed, they should go beyond their comfort zone and their own group to build healthy, and trustful collaborative partnerships. Collaborative leadership within and outside social media is about shared outcomes and results, not about gaining more power or control.

In the open world of Social Media the information and news flow from all directions. Leaders need to visualize and strategically examine how to overcome challenges related to effective communication in the marketplace. The effectiveness of leaders within the Social Media setting is dependent upon leaders' willingness to participate in the process, boost followers' engagement within the open dynamic of the Social Media atmosphere, enhance effectiveness by adapting behavior to meet the demands of fast environmental changes at the same time maintaining flexibility and agility by honing an ability to think and act strategically, make quick moment-to-moment decisions, and respond effectively to unique real-time situations encountered through active engagement with Social Media users.

Leader's effectiveness within Social Media

Four Stages impact the leader's effectiveness within Social Media world:

1. Willingness 2. Engagements 3. Adaptability 4. Agility

1. Willingness.

The first stage…