Recently an article highlighted the fact that CEOs are not engaging in Social Media to adequate effect. Their lack of social contact using the web is put down to being simply too busy, concerned by liability issues, and possibly lack knowledge of social media.
This study was conducted by UberCEO.com on Fortune’s 2009 top 100 CEOs to determine how many were blogging, using Facebook, tweeting on Twitter, connecting on LinkedIn, and utilizing Wikipedia. The results indicating that not too many were.
The findings were:
- Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts. This made Twitter the least used service by Fortune 100 CEOs, despite claims of being one of the fastest growing social media networks.
- 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections. LinkedIn only attracted 13 Fortune 100 CEOs, five of which had just one connection. Three CEOs stood out from the pack on LinkedIn, each having more than 80 connections. However, they are all from technology companies.
- 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page. While there were slightly more Fortune 100 CEO users on Facebook than on LinkedIn, most of them had limited information on their page and few friends.
- Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information. Wikipedia had the highest level of engagement among the Fortune 100 CEOs.
Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog. More surprising is that no Fortune 100 CEO has a public blog that could be easily found.
These results are not damning but clearly show that the senior members within organisations need to re-think how they are working, and make time to engage within online communities.
