Best: Eric Schmidt
With an 80% positive rating, Google's chief continues to draw approval for taking the company from promising tech startup to one of the world's most valuable and influential companies.
Schmidt made headlines in early October when he claimed the worst of the advertising recession was over and declared Google "open for business in making strategic acquisitions."
True to his word, Google bought mobile advertising startup AdMob in November for $750 million and in December reportedly bid for local-business-review site Yelp, though a deal never materialized.
Meanwhile, the Mountain View monolith's home-grown projects -- like the much-hyped Android smartphone platform and the Chrome operating system, a challenger to Microsoft Windows -- are fueling lots of chatter, too.
NEXT: Best: Fritz Henderson
Last updated December 30 2009: 2:06 PM ET
How it was done: Zeta's technology mines the online media landscape -- including millions of blogs, message boards, and social media posts -- and then uses algorithms to measure both the volume and tone of conversations about a given subject -- in this case, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Rankings are based on the percentage of total chatter about a given CEO that is qualified as positive.
