Recently, BusinessNext Social conducted a study of the CMOs (chief marketing officers) in the Fortune 100 to see which of them were most socially active.

Surprisingly, "only one in five CMOs or top-level marketing/communications executives from the Fortune 100 list have an active public presence on social networks," the analysis found.

Some CMOs, however, have huge social influence that separates them from the rest of the Fortune 100 CMOs.

The top three social CMOs of the Fortune 100 in 2012 are...

1. Beth Comstock of General Electric
2. Nikesh Arora of Google
3. Philip W. Schiller of Apple

To rank the CMOs, the company used a formula created by the BusinessNext Social conference director Mark Fidelman. The study considered such metrics as Twitter followers, retweet frequency, social engagement frequency, social mentions, KRED scores, and Klout scores. Weights were assigned to each factor.

To highlight the top 20 social CMOs, BusinessNext Social put together the following infographic.