25 companies that use social media better than you

If you’re wondering which companies care most about trying to figure out the role of social media in their marketing and reputation — as well as what technology management policies should apply when integrating social technologies into traditional IT systems — you might start with a new ranking by social business software developer harmon.ie.

The company has pulled together a list of the most socially active chief information officers (CIOs) in the Fortune 250 (both the U.S. list and the global list).

The “Top 25 Social CIOs” ranking is based on information that harmon.ie gathered from Twitter, SocialMention.com, LinkedIn, Google+ and Alexa. Which is to say that it is about as scientific and subjective as any other social media ranking list you or I could dream up, if we looked at the right data.

What really surprised me as I was reading the harmon.ie blog about this ranking is that harmon.ie figures that only about 10 percent of all CIOs are actually using social tools such as the ones mentioned above for themselves. Apparently, many of them are delegating this task to members of their IT organization, according to harmon.ie.

I was fully prepared to see technology companies dominate this list, and there are plenty included —  probably more than any other industry, including the top choice, SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann.

But there are also some very low-tech brands represented such as petroleum company Pemex, the Royal Bank of Scotland, grocery retailing service company Supervalu, and personal and healthcare products giant Kimberly-Clark.

Figuring out how to integrate social media technologies into traditional IT infrastructure will be a priority for many companies over the next several years. harmon.ie’s ranking gives us an idea of which companies might offer best practices for doing so, based on the level of attention that this is getting from their CIOs.

Here are the companies I’ll be watching:

1. SAP
2. Google
3. Pemex
4. Royal Bank of Scotland
5. Microsoft
6. Supervalu
7. Kimberly-Clark
8. Jacobs Engineering Group
9. Tesco
10. Omnicom Group
11. Office Depot
12. Flextronics
13. Xerox
14. Manpower
15. Computer Sciences
16. Cisco Systems
17. DISH Network
18. Costco Wholesale
19. Dell
20. Constellation Energy
21. IBM
22. Home Depot
23. Avon Products
24. BP
25. Devon Energy

(via Harmon.ie)