Oracle President Mark Hurd Joins Twitter, And He Already Has Almost As Many Tweets As Larry Ellison
Mark Hurd
Oracle co-President Mark Hurd, who's busy revamping Oracle's sales force, has officially joined Twitter, as @MarkVHurd.
Hurd hasn't tweeted yet.
As of Friday evening East Coast time, Hurd had 78 followers — most of them Oracle employees — and was following 67 other Twitter users.
Hurd played tennis at his alma mater Baylor University, and he's following the team on Twitter. But as of Friday, he wasn't yet following his boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Jill Rowley, a "social sales evangelist" who joined Oracle in April in its acquisition of Eloqua, was first to welcome Hurd to Twitter on Friday:
Welcome to Twitter @markvhurd! Our customers are looking forward to your insights. #SocialSelling #SocialBusiness #Transformation @oracle
— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) May 24, 2013
Ellison, who joined Twitter last June, has himself only tweeted once. " Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020," Ellison said in his only tweet since joining.
But at least Ellison has a Twitter account. Safra Catz, Oracle's other co-president, doesn't have one. Neither does SAP CEO Bill McDermott. There are at least 25 parody accounts for Steve Ballmer, but he's not on Twitter either. Meg Whitman's last tweet was in October 2011.
It seems like top enterprise execs feel like there's more to be lost on Twitter than there is to be gained.
We reached out to Oracle for comment on Hurd's arrival to Twitter, but haven't heard back. But a source told us his account has been set up for about three or four months — he's just been too busy to start using it.
That makes sense since Hurd, after Oracle's disappointing earnings last quarter, has vowed to streamline the company's salesforce, which has added some 4,000 new members in the last year and a half.
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