20 CMOs to Follow on Twitter

MarTech Series Is Jotting down 20 Chief Marketing Officers That Leverage Twitter to Talk About a Variety of Topics And, of Course, Promote Their Brand

Being a CMO is a tough job! As business atmosphere rapidly changes all over the world, its the CMO who needs to be on the toes, all the time and adapt continuously. This compels the CMO to develop certain qualities that help deliver on business expectations. So, what are these qualities?

We recently did a piece on must-have qualities for the twenty-first century CMO. Here is a snapshot of the infographic.

Nowadays CMOs need to also double as brand ambassadors, and what better platform to do so than Social Media., especially Twitter. We are listing 20 Chief Marketing Officers that are popular on Twitter and recommended to be followed.

20 CMOs to follow on Twitter – The List

We have divided the list into two parts.

While Part 1 will only list Chief Marketing Officers from the B2B Marketing Automation space, part 2 consists of other business domains.

Chief Marketing Officers from Marketing Automation domains

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Leslie Berland – Twitter

Well, this list is incomplete if we don’t mention Twitter’s CMO to be in the list of CMOs to be followed. Leslie tweets about big/breaking news about Twitter and never shies away from praising and thanking her team!

Leslie’s Twitter handle is @leslieberland

Chris Capossela – Microsoft

Chris’s tweets talk about the wonderful things that Microsoft is doing to transform ideas into reality. So, he speaks about the XBOX, the Internet of Things among several others.

Chris’s Twitter handle is @chriscapossela

Seth Farbman – Spotify

If you are the CMO of Spotify, you automatically become one of the coolest people in the world. Follow Seth for updates on Spotify and the world of Marketing automation.

Follow Seth at @sethfarbman

Ann Lewnes – Adobe

We had to make a list of Ann’s tweets:

1. Marketing
2. Media
3. Movies
4. Music
5. Design
6. Adobe
7. Technology
8. Customer service

Phew! Adobe’s CMO has multiple interests.

Follow her at @alewnes

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Philip Schiller – Apple

Philip has a huge follower count on Twitter even though he does not Tweet very often. Maybe that is because he works for Apple. When he does Tweet though, he is usually posting about Apple or sports teams from the Boston area.

Philip’s Twitter handle is @pschiller

We wanted to step out a little and ask Chief Marketing officers about what exactly it is that makes a good CMO?

In this process, we spoke to Jeff Nolan, CMO, Kahuna and this is what he said, “In a word, failing.

The half-life of a CMO these days is incredibly short, probably around 2 years. CMOs must live by the mantra “last to get credit, first to get the blame.” Organizations are under intense scrutiny from investors, and the power to shape brand has fallen victim to factors that are very often beyond your control. Just ask Facebook.

In the technology industry, every good CMO will have developed a set of skills over his or her career that span product marketing, demand, and brand management disciplines. It is your ability to effectively manage these core marketing functions that will determine success, and it is the failure of one of these areas at a moment of acute need that will tip toward failure.

Failing is a searing lesson in the importance of aligning focus with organization needs. Having been fired, it sucks, but the professional in me understood that I had made a critical miscalculation in my organizational needs analysis. What the company needed was brand management, while my efforts were on demand and product marketing. To me, the customer was the sales team and their immediate needs… but to my CEO, the customer was an external audience of investors and acquirers. I won’t make that mistake again.

An effective CMO, which is higher praise than “good CMO,” balances organizational needs and priorities to deliver the right team structure for the objectives. Effective CMOs are masterful with data AND gut instincts, pulling on historical experiences to avoid stumbles with constantly evolving tactics. A CMO must be in the details today because marketing is an ocean of detail. Without strong leadership, teams cannot be relied upon to navigate those waters for the organizational outcome that is required.”

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Lorraine Twohill – Google

Lorraine’s tweets are centered around Googleverse. Follow to her to know the latest about Google.

Lorraine’s Twitter handle is @LorraineTwohill

Maria Winans – IBM Watson

IBM Watson’s CMO loves to tweet about digital transformation and client experience.

Maria’s Twitter handle is @MariaWinans

Kipp Bodnar – HubSpot

Kipp speaks passionately about sales & marketing functions, especially about HubSpot’s inbound marketing methods.

Kipp’s Twitter handle is @kippbodnar

Sarah Kennedy – Marketo

Sarah’s tweets are a mix of talking about Marketo and everyday events. She has been recently tweeting a lot about Adobe after the acquisition. Her bio is evident about the fact that she loves aviation, fonts, Trap music and bad jokes.

Sarah’s Twitter handle is @saykay

Antonio J Lucio – Facebook

Antonio fathers five daughters and has worked in Hewlett Packard in the past. With a high follower count, the Facebook CMO shares interesting pieces from the business world

Antonio’s Twitter handle is @ajlucio5

We asked Jenn Steele, CMO, Madison Logic about aspects of a good CMO and she said, “The very best CMOs understand their weaknesses and hire well to compensate.  It’s nearly impossible to be a storyteller, graphic designer, data guru, brand expert, sales enabler extraordinaire, and leader all wrapped up together. While good CMOs must certainly dabble in each area and be able to recognize good talent and results, they should hire to their weaknesses. For example, I love great design, but I can’t do it to save my life (plus I’m slightly color-blind!), so I make sure I have a good designer on my team or as a contractor to compensate.

The one area CMOs can’t really hire to compensate for, however, is leadership. We must be willing to make hard decisions and take responsibility when things don’t go well. We must be able to form cross-functional coalitions so that we can get revenue-driving work done. Fundamentally, you can’t outsource that to someone else’s brain.”

Chief Marketing Officers from Non-Marketing Automation domains

Morgan Flatley – McDonald’s

Morgan’s Twitter feed is all about methods and insights on building great brands. And why not? Working for brands like, now McDonald’s, and previously Gatorade is obviously not a walk in the park.

Follow Morgan at @MorgsF

Karen Quintos – Dell

Dell’s CMO enjoys tweeting about technology & marketing. She is also a supporter of helping female entrepreneurs grow.

Karen’s Twitter handle is @KarenHQuintos

Diego Scotti – Verizon

Diego takes great pride in working for Verizon. It shows in his tweets and retweets as he is extremely consistent with sharing everything happening pertaining to Verizon.

Follow Diego at @diegoscotti

Karen Walker – Cisco

Karen loves to talk about Cisco and what the brand is innovating in various spaces such as IoT, marketing, security etc.

Follow Karen at @KarMWalker

Keith Weed – Unilever

Marketing, business growth, and technology are a few subjects that Keith, CMO of Unilever regularly tweets about.

Follow Keith at @keithweed

Jascha Wolff – Mozilla

Jascha has authored Growing Up Fast and is an excellent marketer and advisor. He candidly states that he is all ‘pocket squares’ in his bio. We are sure that the CMO of Mozilla is far more than that.

Follow Jascha at @kaykas

This is what Jim Nichols, CMO of Partnerize thinks qualities of a good CMO.

“Broadly I think there are three “types” of CMOs – the operator, the change agent, and the visionary. Operators are hired to make existing marketing operations work more effectively and to gradually evolve them based on what works. Change agents are hired to help a company evolve its total operations to one that is more customer-first and digitally savvy. Visionaries are hired to chart a future course for the way that the company will interact with consumers and do business in the future. Naturally, all three “types” must also cover off on the other functions, but the way they are viewed and measured in their organizations usually comes back to one of these models. The essential quality I see is to understand and deliver on your specific remit and make marketing more of a revenue source and less a cost center.

Marketing in all organizations must now be tied to measurable business growth. CMOs of whatever background must embrace customer data and performance measurement to demonstrate their value. There may always be brand benefits that cannot be directly tied to revenue, but our job is to reduce the proportion of marketing investments that fall into that bucket.”

Diana O’Brien – Deloitte

Diana’s high follower count must be a result of her being a CMO at Deloitte coupled with here attitude to serve and make the world a better place. Diana tweets about the well-being of human beings and often speaks out about Autism.

Follow Diana at @DianaMOBrien

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Marisa Thalberg – Taco Bell

Taco Bell’s CMO tweets about current events, marketing and of course Taco Bell. She is the president of ExecutiveMoms.com

Marisa’s twitter handle is @ExecutiveMoms

Derek Slayton, CMO Terminus talks about important qualities in a CMO.

“ The first essential skill is the ability to build a great team that is able to take on tough challenges, not be afraid to fail and to always shares what they are learning while doing so.

The second is being really focused on three things from a business standpoint:

• Helping the company focus on the key segments of the market where they are most likely to build long-term, successful relationships–focus-focus-focus. The key is to make it work beautifully in your best segments, then worry about scale
• Setting up a system of measurement for how you are progressing against the key initiatives. It is essential to show (in real-time) where you are moving the needle in the areas that sales and marketing are hyper-focused on
• Lastly, be able to iterate, optimize and drive efficiencies based on what you are seeing. Share learnings quickly by bring data to the discussion and drive quick decisions about doubling down, or scaling back.”

Brian Kenny – Harvard Business School

The CMO of Harvard Business School tweets about HBS insights and news that influences his followers (59.4 K of them). His Twitter bio reflects his singing prowess.

Brian’s Twitter handle is @hbscmo

Linda Boff – General Electric

GE’s CMO tweets about leadership, technology, marketing etc. he loves art and is an ardent fan of the New York Giants.

Follow Linda at @lindaboff

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Lastly, it was our very own Andrea Lechner-Becker, CMO LeadMD who concluded the list when asked about the qualities that a good CMO must have.

“Who wants “good?” I’ll talk about great. It depends dramatically on the size of the organization. For small companies, like start-ups, a great CMO needs to understand they own everything…and I mean everything. These leaders likely came from much larger teams where they once had someone on the team who specialized. They had someone, for example, who managed Google Analytics. They don’t now. A great CMO understands he or she will own set up of every tool. And they’ll own the management of it, too. They’ll also own the reporting and the optimization. A great small company CMO knows they are an acrobat without a net.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, in an enterprise company, a great CMO is a connector. The job of the CMO is to connect the needs of individual team members to the budget. They connect team members with people in the larger business community, and to connect the goals of the organization to the strategy. They also connect cross-functional teams to the right people internally and externally to get their job done.

The one thing that company size will not dictate is the fact that every great CMO needs to impact revenue. If marketing isn’t driving higher LTV, it’s failing and that’s squarely on the CMO’s head.”

That was our list of 20 CMOs to follow on Twitter. Tell us what you think! Email us at news@martech.com

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