CFOs’ Anti-Social Tendencies may be Changing
CFOs are more reluctant than their colleagues to support social business. While understandable, there are forces that may be creating some changes in the attitude of CFOs. This blog post is part of our series on social business in the C-Suite.
Topics
Social Business
In most companies, the CFO typically isn’t the biggest cheerleader for social business.
Our May 30, 2012 report: Social Business: What are Companies Really Doing?, published in collaboration with Deloitte, found that only 13.5% of CFOs surveyed view social tools as important to their organizations. This contrasts with the 28% of CEOs, presidents and managing directors that regarded social tools as important.
This skepticism among CFO’s isn’t too surprising, considering that the profession’s obligation is to scrutinize costs, ensure that monies expended show a clear return, and typically apply quantitative methods to evaluate value.
It also doesn’t help that CFOs must be particularly mindful about consequences of inadvertently releasing information that violates financial disclosure laws. In one well-publicized case, Francesca’s Holding Corporation fired its CFO last May after it determined he improperly distributed company information on Twitter and Facebook.
And, unlike a CMO or CIO, who might anticipate some potential benefits of social initiatives paying off directly to their own functional areas, it’s not so obvious for a CFO to see an immediate benefit for his/her own department. (An article in Deloitte’s Insights for CFOs published in the Wall Street Journal this past January, though, examined how CFOs can use social software to make the process of closing the books more transparent, efficient, repeatable and defensible.)
But the implications of not supporting social business can go beyond the CFO’s own operations. Depending on how much influence a particular CFO may have, he or she may have the power to slow down or even halt a company’s move towards becoming a more social enterprise.
Interestingly, though, over the past year one of the profession’s key trade journals, CFO.com (Boston, MA) has published a series of articles about social business with the same message to its readers: stay open and consider the advantages of more engagement. Articles have examined research that showed how social business can improve a company’s competitiveness, efficiency, and even its bottom line. The headlines had similar types of messages: “CFOs can’t afford to opt out of social media;” and “Social media’s biggest business risk, more enlightened CFOs say, is failing to participate in social media.â