In between project meetings, arguments with angry stakeholders, irrational budget discussions and all those day-to-day spot fires that make up the working moment of a typical CIO, it’s reassuring to know that there’s still plenty of time to tweet.
In the US, social software provider harmon.ie has identified the top 25 socially active CIOs among Fortune 250 companies. It’s the kind of stats-candy research that appeals to three groups; CIOs who rarely get tired reading about themselves, IT industry insiders who latch onto any snippet of information that may help them with a sales pitch and of course professional recruiters angling to fill the jobs of the tweeting CIOs.
Here’s a link to the full list over at <i>Mashable</i>, but in the meantime the top five are: Oliver Bussman, global CIO of SAP; Benjiman Freed, CIO of Google; Abraham Galan, CIO of Pemex; Ian Alderton, CIO of the Royal Bank of Scotland; and Anthony Scott, corporate VP and CIO of Microsoft.
At a pinch, it’s possible to imagine how the CIO of Google and the CIO of Microsoft might just slip the creation of pithy 140 character references into their CVs. As for Bussman’s rank at the top, yeah maybe, presumably he’s tweeting invoices. And RBS’s Alderton’s rank makes total sense, just as long as every message says, "Nothing to see here folks" or even better, "On behalf of everyone here at the Bank, sorry".
Finally, Pemex which describes itself on its roughly translated website as “the biggest company of Mexico and Latin America, and the most important fiscal contributor of the country,” at least has something worth crowing about. "Bombeamos tanto el carbón en la atmósfera. ¡Ay, caramba!"
For its part <i>Techcrunch</i> reckons the study demonstrates “that people tasked with helming the leading companies in their information technology, and deciding on how to invest in social media specifically, may not know all that much about it, specifically in a first-hand way but possibly more generally, too.”
Perhaps, or maybe, unlike reporters and bloggers, the people overseeing strategic development and execution of technology at 250 of the biggest companies in the world have better things to do with their time.
Speaking of the biggest companies in the world (at least by market cap, shortly)…
Facebook bought Instagram today for $1 billion dollars (maniacal Dr Evil cackle). If you are wondering why, it probably has something to do with this — www.pinterest.com — which as ReadWriteWeb pointed out, is now the third largest social media site in the world. Poor, old Zuck. He hasn’t even got his mittens on that lazy $27 billion the IPO will generate for him, and already the crowd is moving on to the next big thing. Fashion is fleeting, after all.
This is Facebook’s largest acquisition to date, as The New York Times pointed out, “It’s a notable move for Facebook, which has exclusively focused on bite-size acquisitions, worth less than $100 million.”
The Times also noted that Instagram provides Facebook immediately with greater mobile punch, regarded as the social network’s soft underbelly since its audience is migrating to mobile very, very rapidly, but so far, advertising dollars are not.
Andrew Birmingham is the CEO of Silicon Gully Investments. Follow him on Twitter @ag_birmingham.