IT ratchets up social-media involvement

Although marketing still rules most companies' social-media strategy decisions, IT is increasingly getting a seat at the table.

When a late arrival thought he'd catch up on the buzz at a recent conference of CIOs, he logged into Twitter. What he found -- or rather didn't find -- amazed him.

"I couldn't find a single tweet about what was happening at the conference that morning -- 300 CIOs in a room and not a single one using Twitter," recalls Paul Gillin, founder of Paul Gillin Communications, a social media consultancy in Framingham, Mass. Gillin, a former Computerworld editor in chief, was referring to a 2010 conference held by a vendor he didn't want to name.

Though he acknowledges that marketing is the dominant use of social media tools, the lack of Twitter activity by a group of CIOs "didn't make sense to me," Gillin says. "When a new technology comes into use, it is IT's responsibility to understand it."

"It's unfortunate that CIOs who really should be out there leading and experimenting and innovating are not," says Ed Marx, CIO at Texas Health Resources and a self-described "big-time" Twitter user. "Were they healthcare CIOs? We're always five to 10 years behind," says Ed Marx, CIO at Texas Health Resources in Arlington, in response to Gillin's anecdote. Marx, who calls himself a "big-time" Twitter user, says, "it's unfortunate that CIOs who really should be out there leading and experimenting and innovating are not."

Marx says he started using Twitter two and a half years ago, and now regularly uses Facebook, LinkedIn and an internal social media tool.

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Source: computerworld.com
By: Michael Fitzgerald