What is leadership in the new normal? And what does it have to do with social media?

That was a discussion we had last week at MACPA’s Beach Retreat in Ocean City, Md. The conversation started in a group of 24 spread across two continents and included two leading business authors, and it went to a potential audience of 45,600 in one day!

I had to document this serendipitous case study of exactly what we were talking about. (See my SlideShare presentation below and embedded links.) Notice how we used a series of social media tools to communicate, share and learn from our network — SlidesShare, YouTube, a blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tom Peters started off the conversation by saying leadership hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

Emmanuel Gobillot agreed and added that tools, expectations and challenges have changed.

Joe Boutte weighed in by saying that leadership is the only constant in change and a primary success factor.

What started as a great discussion quickly evolved into a case study that illustrates why I believe every CEO should think about blogging and tweeting.

Blogging, Twitter and other social media tools are powerful communication and connection tools that can be added to the CEOs toolbox. As Tom Peters said, they have pluses and minuses, but he is a great example of how to use the tools for sharing and refining insights. (Check out his blog and Twitter account, as well as his interview about blogging with Seth Godin.)

As Emmanuel Gobillot said to sum it all up:

“To work out what are the enduring truths and what are the changing elements. On the basis that human beings evolve at an incredibly slow rate I would agree with anyone who says past leadership models are still relevant to today’s challenges but given that most were developed pre-Internet (computers even) and pre-global interconnected economies, I would also challenge anyone who argues they should not be contextualized.”