The folks at Harmon.ie, the Sharepoint social experience product company, took a look at the Fortune 250 amd Global 250 lists, and ordered the top 25 CIOs based on their social activity online. How did they measure them?

“Methodology

We created the top 25 Social CIO guide using a formula by social scoring expert Mark Fidelman (an executive at harmon.ie). The formula takes information gleaned from Twitter, SocialMention.com, LinkedIn, Google+ and Alexa into account.  Fidelman’s research and compilation of top influencers lists has been covered by the NY Times, Forbes and several other publications.”

And here are the results.

The numbers looked like a power law to me, so I plotted the curve and got this:

Power law distributions occur frequently, like the size of earthquakes and craters on the moon. In human affairs, popularity of many kinds follows a power law distribution. For example, Jason Kottke established that inbound links to the top 100 blogs on Technorati in 2003 followed a power law:

At any rate, I would have been surprised if the graph didn’t look like a power law, and it would probably line up better if they had included more data points, like the next 75 CIOs. Social networks are scale-free networks, meaning that those that have more connections are more likely to gain new connections as new people join the network or as established member shift their connections. This boils down to “those that have, get,” and, yes, wealth and fame outside of online social networks follow the same distribution.

But then, that’s the other important factoid from this study: Only 10 percent of the CIOs in the two lists are social at all. Ninety percent of the CIOs in those 500 major companies have zero social presence or experience.

That’s another reason why CIOs are increasingly losing their power, their budget, and the trust of their CEOs.

I bet 100 percent of chief digital officers are social, however.