To Tweet or not to Tweet....if you're a CEO

A recent survey conducted by UberCEO, laments the lack of engagement with social networking tools by Fortune 100 CEOs. Among the findings: 2 have Twitter accounts, 13 maintain Linkedin profiles and 19 have a personal Facebook page. No executive maintains a blog.

The survey doesn’t reveal if the CEOs previously used the tools and ultimately rejected them. Neither does it evaluate how competently their companies are integrating social networking into their corporate marketing strategies. Nonetheless the data is interesting and provides a useful benchmark to compare against future findings.

That said, it’s quite a stretch to suggest that the absence of a personal blog, a Facebook page or a frequent Twitter stream might make a CEO appear “disengaged, disinterested and disconnected” to customers.

The CEOs I know that don’t maintain Facebook pages are far from disconnected. And their stakeholders generally know it, even without a reminder tweet. In today’s grim economy, the “conversation” (as we communications pros like to call it) continues unabated. It’s happening live in customer boardrooms across the globe where corporate chiefs are fighting to close deals on advanced technology in a cruel industry downturn. Time- and- budget-strapped? Certainly. Disengaged? Hardly.

And they’ve been blogging for years—just not externally. Instead, they’re wisely using this tool to engage candidly and frequently with employees—inspiring confidence and more recently, preserving morale in deeply volatile times.

So before we dismiss as “social networking laggards” those that are not personally a-Twitter, it’s fair to consider that maintaining an online identity may not be the smartest use of their time. Indeed, the Fortune 100 CEOs might already have reached that conclusion. And for many, especially those that operate in diverse cultural and geographic selling environments, blogs, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter may not be the most relevant mediums to personally communicate with those that influence the success of their business.