Last month I wrote this post sharing my views on how to achieve success in social media and one of the four key ingredients I had identified was the need to secure executive support. I then saw this study that examined the social behaviors of the Fortune 100 CMOs. While the overall results did not appear too surprising, with only 15 out of the total 143 CMOs and Chief Communications Officers having active Twitter accounts, some of the companies on the list did surprise me.
I then decided to cross-reference these results with those of a 2009 Altimeter Group study that evaluated the overall ‘social’ score of the world’s top 100 brands, and this confirmed my suspicions. Besides the fact that 8 of the 20 companies in the Fortune100 CMO study did not appear at all in the Altimeter Group study, the correlation of leadership in social business and whether your CMO is active on Twitter between the remaining 12 is quite low. The most glaring outlier was Microsoft which ranked fifth (out of 100) in the Altimeter Group study, although their CMO appears to be dead last in the Fortune100 study.
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