SYDNEY: Australia’s leading chief executive officers still don’t understand the power and influence of social media according to the latest available numbers for two key social platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The failure of Australia’s top CEOs to engage with social media raises questions about their understanding of one of the most powerful business related paradigm shifts in the 21st century.
The fact that Australian business leaders are bypassing social media is clear from the results of a survey of the CEOs of the top 20 publicly listed companies and their relationships with LinkedIn and Twitter, conducted by The Australian Financial Review’s Chanticleer.
The two leading executives in terms of social platform connections are Telstra CEO David Thodey and ANZ Banking Group CEO Mike Smith.
Thodey was one of the first executives in Australia to appoint a chief social media officer. Mike Smith embraced social media after a trip to Silicon Valley in 2010.
Thodey is a LinkedIn influencer with 33,323 followers, while Smith is a LinkedIn influencer with 100,438 followers. Thodey is on Twitter and has about 4150 followers. Smith is on Twitter but his account is protected.
Thodey has taken social media seriously for several years. He is a big user of the internal social media network called Yammer. Telstra has the largest Yammer community in the Asia-Pacific region and the 14th-largest globally, according to Yammer.
Eleven of the top 20 CEOs are not on LinkedIn and 13 of them are not on Twitter.
However, several of the top 20 CEOs are doing better when using another measure of LinkedIn engagement and that is the number of connections.
