Marketing Pilgrim

With all the talk of social media this and social media that, it’s hard not to feel some pressure to be involved in some way or another. That is unless, of course, you are one of the CEO of some of the biggest companies in the world, as TechCrunch reports on a survey conducted by UBERCEO. Apparently the Top 100 companies of the Fortune 500 have CEO’s that are not getting in the game. Considering some of the press these guys and gals get these days that may be a good idea.

The highlights

• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
• 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.
• 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page.
• Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.
• Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog.

So is this a problem? Of course, that is a question that is open to opinion so let me chime in with mine. CEOs who run companies of any real influence should tread extremely lightly in the social media space. If the company is publically traded the risks involved, at least on the surface, seem to far outweigh the potential upside.

Let’s be realistic as well. Does anyone really think that they are going to become a “bff” of a CEO just through social media? Is this the new way to get from the mail room to the boardroom in today’s corporate world? Not likely.

Also, there is a better than fair chance that when a CEO is actually involved in this kind of medium, many would suspect that it wouldn’t really be the CEO doing the work. You can’t turn around without hearing the cries of “There are not enough hours in the day to keep up with social media!” so the likelihood of a busy CEO carving out some time to tweet or post or update anything is not real high. One side effect of the ridiculous amount of information that is available to everyone today is the increasingly high level of skepticism that comes along with it. Why have to try to prove that you (if you are that CEO actually making the social media effort) are really the one sending tweets and updating their Facebook page?

Social media efforts have to be careful to not run too far ahead of themselves. There needs to be a lot of crawling before a full sprint social media effort by anyone is undertaken. Based on that, it might be wise to keep the CEO’s to their regular jobs. A lot of good work can be undone real quickly by one bad moment from the C-suite that is broadcast to the world via social media channels. Why risk that?

Social Media Monitoring in Just 60-Seconds. Guaranteed!

Share this post