When CEOs tweet: Cautionary tales for execs on Twitter

These days if you sneeze funny, it can go viral—and for CEOs, catching a cold may be the least of their worries. The myriad social media tools available to CEOs can be a mixed bag.

Take Twitter, for instance. There are numerous content opportunities if you implement it properly, but there are caveats. As reported by Louis Bedgian in Benzinga, a financial media outlet, CEOs aren’t infallible—and their words can cause financial tremors.

Marlene Morris Towns, a Georgetown University marketing professor, told Bedgian that in many instances, a CEO’s tweets are often distributed in real time without being vetted.

“They’re not run through legal and compliance which allows you a lot of flexibility to jump on things as they happen—it also holds you at risk,” said Towns.

Towns added that CEOs “step in it themselves sometime by letting their personal views be known when they shouldn’t necessarily be known. Sometimes that’s their fault; sometimes it’s not. Somebody asks them a question in an interview, they say something off the cuff, and next thing you know, it’s on social media.”