Social Media for IT Professionals: 7 Trends to Follow

By Neal Schaffer

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of CDW. All opinions are 100% mine.
Recently I had a chance to present on social media for IT professionals at the 2012 SOTEC conference. I made the point that, with the advent of social business, every internal department deserves a “seat at the table,” and it would be the responsibility of IT executives to make decisions that could determine the fate of their company’s social media implementation. To help those in attendance, and based on my social media consulting experience, I presented on the following seven trends that are important for information technology professionals to follow vis a vis social media:
1.) Corporate Investment in Social Media Will Continue to Increase
We are all spending more time online, and recent studies indicate that we spend more time in social media than searching the internet or reading emails. If the web, email, and now social media are the three effective tools businesses need for effective outreach and communication, and if social media positively affects both SEO and email CTR, shouldn’t marketing budgets towards social media be aligned with this reality? This is what will drive social media budgets to continue to increase, even though this trend might not yet be apparent at your company.
2.) The Trend from Social Media to Social Business

As companies move from a purely outward-bound marketing focus in social media to one that helps them better align their company with the social media user, communication in social media will no longer be “owned” by one division. Internal departments such as HR (recruiting, policy, guidelines, training), Legal (policy, compliance), Customer Service, and, yes, even IT will need to participate in internal dialogue to help decide the best way to move the company forward vis a vis social media. It will be important for IT to rise to the challenge, and in order to do so IT management must be well-versed in how their company and others are implementing social media.
3.) Social Media for Internal Collaboration
The need for internal departments to collaborate as outlined in trend #2 will only accelerate the need for an internal collaboration tool. While Jive Software has been the leader in this field, Microsoft’s purchase of Yammer puts them in the spotlight. If your company hasn’t invested in a similar platform, it might be time to start doing some proactive research here.
4.) Enterprises are Generating LOTS of Content
With the advent of content marketing, and consumer brands like Coca Cola and Red Bull striving to become content companies, there’s going to be a LOT of blog posts, videos, and other content that enterprises are going to be publishing. That requires even more robust Content Management Systems than ever, and with the global reach of social media, those systems will more than likely have to handle the management of content across several languages.

5.) Companies are Becoming Listeners
Not only is your company producing lots of contents, including social media postings, but so are your competitors, and more importantly, your customers. Social media listening platforms have been around for years now, but has your company started to seriously consider developing your own social media command center? Guess who’s job it will be to create such a system?
6.) Big (Social) Data
My colleague Joel Don recently blogged about the Big Data impact on social media marketing. I couldn’t agree with him more. While Big Data goes beyond merely social media, without a doubt all of the content being generated, including videos, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts. et. al. adds up. It also means, in addition to managing the CMS as well as listening platforms, there is a need for this data to be utilized internally as part of a Social CRM system, where all of the internal departments can equally share all of this data. Right now this data is siloed internally between email systems, traditional CRM, and other platforms. At some point this will all need to be integrated both with each other and social media.
7.) Compliance
Needless to say that social media provides enterprises with many risks, and with social media content being required for both E-Discovery as well as requests increasingly being made for social data during regulatory examinations, compliance requirements mean that companies need to get serious about their data storage management solutions.
A majority of these trends will affect the IT infrastructure of the enterprise and point to the need for companies to be more efficient in their Data Storage Management. CDW is one company that offers Data Storage Management and Virtualization solutions that can help satisfy the needs of the enterprise as they continue to generate more data – and need to comply with regulations – while managing their Storage Area Networks, Blade Servers, Archiving Software, E-Discovery Software, Data De-Duplication, and Data Storage Virtualization needs. CDW’s effective data management solutions can help transform your IT environment by providing flexibility and systematically standardizing and simplifying your data storage systems.
For those interested, for a limited time you can download a free whitepaper where CDW will show you how to Reduce Your IT Data Storage Requirements by 20-40%. You will learn how to:

• gain faster access to critical info
• better support your workforce
• protect organizational data
• eliminate infrastructure inefficiencies

Is the growing use of social media already influencing the way you manage information technology at your company? Please share your experiences with us!

http://windmillnetworking.com/2012/10/30/social-media-for-it-professionals-7-trends-to-follow/