CIOs: Are You Walking the Social Media Walk?

When implementing change in an organization, the best recipe for success usually means starting from the top. People follow leaders, and leaders must lead by example.

Social media and collaboration is the future of business, most analysts, entrepreneurs and observers seem to agree. And yet, according to a survey by harmon.ie, a social collaboration software company, only 10 percent of Fortune 250 CIOs are actually engaging in social behavior.

That means the vast majority of CIOs are not blogging, using wikis, tweeting or otherwise engaging in the increasingly important world of social media.

What’s preventing CIOs from engaging socially? And how long will this transition to a social enterprise take if the CIO isn’t leading the charge?

Ingrid Lunden, a TechCrunch writer, spoke with SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann, who topped harmon.ie’s list of social CIOs. Bussmann explained his path to social media glory:

SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann tells me he got started with his social media use in 2006, with an internal blog covering corporate IT issues such as enterprise mobility — the first foray that many made at that time into user-generated content and getting more social. That blog eventually was made public, and Bussmann says it is now one of the most-visited blogs in SAP’s blog network.

Today, he says he uses Twitter (4,218 followers) most of all in his social communication, with Facebook and LinkedIn having secondary roles. He gets the most traffic, he says, from people on Twitter, while LinkedIn is more for people reaching out to him to work at SAP. And on Facebook, “People comment but not so much on business topics.”

Are you a CIO who has been slow to jump on the social media bandwagon? If so, now is the time to show your social enterprise leadership.

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