10 Key Social Insights About CMOs - and the Huge Opportunity Many are Missing

As I've written about in the past, most recently just last week - the role of a CMO is changing from one of chief marketing officer to one of chief engagement officer. And of course in today's world, the best and most direct way to engage with someone is via the use of social media, which according to Carter Hostelley, CEO of LeadTail is the #1 thing CMOs have in common.

"Embracing social media to ask questions, engage in conversations, and share what interests them - so they can do their jobs better," says Hostelley in a recently-released joint report from Leadtail and Neustar entitled Social Insights: How CMOs engage with people, brands, and content on Twitter.

The report is based on the review of over 130,000 tweets between September 2014 to December 2014 from people who had the following titles or responsibilities: Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Marketing, EVP/ SVP/VP Marketing, or EVP/SVP/VP Digital. Of the 1,034 marketing leaders in the U.S. and Canada whose tweets were analyzed, approximately 52% were B2C marketers, 31% were B2B marketers, and another 17% were agency marketers.

Here's the 10 key social insights about CMOs they identified:

1. Across the board CMOs are looking for strategic insights from people, publications, and vendors to cope with the explosion of technology and data-driven marketing.
2. The CMO-CIO relationship is getting serious. Marketing executives are taking an active role in beefing up their tech chops, including consuming more content traditionally targeted to IT readers.
3. The line between B2B and B2C marketing continues to blur, but B2B marketers do remain more focused on technology, where B2C marketers place more emphasis on brand.
4. Marketers appetite for location-based “check-in” apps has diminished significantly, with only 5% of marketing leaders sharing Foursquare check-ins as compared to 28% only 24 months ago.
5. Meanwhile, LinkedIn has made significant inroads with marketing executives; cross posting of LinkedIn content to Twitter is up 200% over the past 24 months.
6. CMOs’ media consumption and sharing habits continue to lean toward visual content that transitions seamlessly between desktop and mobile environments.
7. CMOs get most of their news and opinion reporting from a relatively small number of sources, which creates both challenges and opportunities for upstart brands and thought leaders.
8. CMOs are attuned to the value of their “personal brand”, and love to talk about and share lists of how influential CMOs compare and stack up.
9. Social media influence is shifting, from the notion of simply having a large audience to that of having a highly valuable audience.
10. Social insights help marketers identify current influencers and up-and-coming sources to watch

Let's break down two of these in further detail.

The Huge Opportunity Many CMOs are Missing

The #8 key insight ties directly into this missed opportunity for as much as "CMOs are attuned to the value of their 'personal brand'" - it appears many of them are not capitalizing on the huge opportunity that is there for them in the form of LinkedIn.

As part of their research LeadTail and Neustar analyzed a random sampling of the CMOs who part of the overall analysis and of the 15 they sampled, only two had published posts to their own LinkedIn profile. No, this is not the same thing as sharing a link via LinkedIn and yes, I had someone ask that me not all that long ago.

I'm talking about taking full advantage of the blogging platform that LinkedIn provides to everyone. As for what content CMOs can publish here it can be:

• A post that ran on your company's site
• A post that ran on a 3rd party/industry site
• Something completely original i.e. share your thoughts on a given topic or survey or campaign - anything that is a) industry-related and b) you have an opinion on. The best part is the post does not or should not be very long. A few well thought-out paragraphs is all it takes.

The CMO-CIO Relationship

Not only is this relationship (#2 above) getting serious it's also getting mission critical. In order for any company/brand to succeed there must an alignment between the CMO and the CIO/CTO. It is so vitally important we identified it as one of the 5 key solutions (#2 ironically) in the CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms - a joint effort between Oracle Marketing Cloud and The CMO Club.

Download it today and hear directly from "marketing executives are taking an active role in beefing up their tech chops" plus see why having a customer-driven technology roadmap is paramount for success.