Daimler CEO Shuns Drenching in German Twitter Avoidance

By Alex Webb

Source: Twitter via Bloomberg

Mary Barra, chief executive officer of General Motors Inc., is seen taking the ALS... Read More

When Adam Opel AG Chief Executive Officer Karl-Thomas Neumann was drenched with water by school children, he nominated the heads of General Motors Co., Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG (VOW) to suffer the same fate. Only his boss, GM CEO Mary Barra, immediately took to social media and accepted.
Daimler chief Dieter Zetsche and VW CEO Martin Winterkorn never took on Neumann’s ALS ice-bucket challenge, electing instead to make charitable donations.
Zetsche and Winterkorn’s skirting of this and other social media phenomenons, embraced by U.S. CEOs from Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook to General Electric Co.’s Jeff Immelt, is the norm among top executives in Germany. Indeed, Immelt’s postings via
Twitter Inc. (TWTR) equal that of all top executives in Germany’s benchmark DAX Index, where SAP SE chief Bill McDermott, an American, is the only CEO with a Twitter account.
“German companies have to be a bit braver,” said Till Wargalla, a Hamburg-based social media consultant at Omnicom Group Inc., who counts DAX companies among his clients. “They’re too preoccupied with what could possibly go wrong. Social media can be used by a CEO to communicate with the general public. It happens far too little in Germany.”

Photographer: Ralph Orlowski/Bloomberg

Adam Opel AG Chief Executive Officer Karl-Thomas Neumann nominated the CEOs of General... Read More

Even if many accounts are run by public relations teams, American executives recognize social media as an important tool to engage with customers, employees and the capital markets, Wargalla said. Almost 10 percent of CEOs in the S&P 500 (SPX) have a public Twitter account, according to Bloomberg News research. In the U.K., 12 percent of FTSE 100 (UKX) CEOs have a Twitter presence. The German reluctance has to do partially with bad past experiences.

Public Ridicule

“When the first German public figures took to Twitter in 2008, they were ridiculed by the German media,” said Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, a sociologist specializing in social media at the University of Hamburg. “Newspapers said it was impossible to communicate seriously in just 140 characters.”
The reluctance of German executives to embrace social media is also a reflection of the broader public. Just 7 percent of the country’s web users have a Twitter account, according to a study last year by public broadcasters ARD and ZDF. That compares with 18 percent of American Internet users, according to an estimate from Pew Research.
There is also a considerable difference between how much time Germans and Americans spend on social networks. The ARD and ZDF study found that less than one third of German Twitter users actually posted on the microblog site. Americans with social network accounts spend more than 3 1/2 hours each day using them, according to a study by researcher Ipsos.

Authenticity

Nonetheless, German executives running multinational companies, many of which have a majority of their sales outside their home market, are missing opportunities to connect with their global customer base.
“It gives CEOs the opportunity to increase their authenticity and approachability,” said Olaf Waschkies, a Cologne-based managing director of Publicis Groupe SA (PUB)’s Pixelpark AG marketing unit. “Access to CEOs is heavily filtered at German companies. A communication usually runs through multiple internal filters before it reaches its end point.”
While Germans have historically not been “early adopters” of new consumer technologies, people are quick to pick them up once their viability has been proven, said Waschkies, citing mobile phone usage as an example.
Opening a Twitter account was Neumann’s own idea, said Harald Hamprecht, a spokesman for the carmaker. VW donated 25,000 euros to a charity which does ALS research in its hometown of Wolfsburg, while Zetsche made an unspecified donation, spokesmen for the two carmakers said.
“Most German managers still think the most important thing is to appear in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Manager Magazin,” Waschkies said, referring to three of the country’s top print publications. ‘‘It will take a few years to change mindsets.’’