A Tapestry of Social Media for the Collaborative Enterprise

According to Prohaska (2011), CIOs will need to develop strategies for implementing four key technologies in the next 10 years:

1. Cloud computing
2. Context-based computing
3. Pattern-based computing
4. Social computing

CIOs must recognize how all of the four weave together as part of a social media strategic plan. To begin with, CIOs must understand the sheer magnitude of computing power offered by the cloud. Only when that becomes clear can cloud-based resources be fully exploited. Nowadays, end users rely on a number of mobile devices to remain connected to customers, partners, vendors, and employees. This requires their mobile devices to be able to access external applications and services. Therefore, CIOs will be obliged to modify existing internal applications to be context-aware in order to respond to the type of device requesting access. In order to analyze and leverage this incoming data, organizations need pattern-based computing. Tightly interweaving these technologies leads to a computing environment that not only provides economic value to an organization, but enables essential collaboration with customers and business partners. This allows business partners to interact with an organization and access crucial information 24/7 which leads to more data patterns for the organization, allowing it to anticipate the needs of its business partners. All of which builds confidence and trust, leading to a stronger, more strategic business relationship.

From a "historic" perspective, here's a brief timeline of how technology-based communications have progressed:

2001:	27% of executives use email
2006:	70% of executives use email "Social media" is unheard of
2011:	50% of executives participate in three to five social networking sites 40% check the sites more than once a day

Even with the explosion in popularity of social media, less than 2% of companies are utilizing it for customer service purposes. While many organizations may consider that they have a social media presence at some level, very few of them have embraced social media as a viable marketing channel. For those who remember the early days of the internet, the similarities of the web and social media as business marketing tools is striking. Early adopters of both technologies assumed an "If you build it, they will come" attitude. With regard to the internet and how web site have evolved since its inception, this clearly was not the case.

One way in which the Web and social networking differ is that the Web is just that...one-way communication. Whereas, social media involves interactive, sometimes real-time exchanging of ideas and information.

I found this article to be particularly relevant to several of the readings over the past five weeks. For example, this week we read about the strategic communications imperative and the importance of having communications professionals at the strategy-making table (Argenti, Howell, & Beck, 2005). This was never so important as when an organization is planning its first strategy for a social media presence. Such an undertaking requires input from many functional teams, such as marketing, sales, and IT. We learned from Bonini, Mendonca and Oppenheim (2006) that the times they are a-changing and organizations had better know how to change with them with regard to corporate strategy or become extinct at worst or yesterday's news at best. What better way to convince your stakeholders that your organization is built to change than to have a clearly defined social media strategy? And those companies that don't yet have a strategy in place for jumping on the social media bandwagon had better hurry. According to Prohaska's timeline, it takes about four years to develop a recognized presence in social media.

References

Prohaska, B. (2011 July/August). Social media for the collaborative enterprise. IT Pro, pp. 68, 61-63.