In a recent blog post on CIO.com, Michael Hugos talked about how current economic factors, in combination with the rapid growth in social media and associated support technologies are creating an opportunity for CIOs to take a leadership role in bridging these industry trends. Hugos cites a recent Gartner report that in three years, the CMO on average may have a bigger technology budget than the CIO. He also notes that with the growth in cloud and BYOD initiatives, social technologies are quickly creeping into enterprise operations.
The convergence here is really setting the stage for social business. Extending order status, customer service, and the like to where customers are is innovative. However, this model could still end up just being another push of information if customers aren’t offered an opportunity to also engage with the company if they should so choose.
As I covered on my previous post, Social Business is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily connecting the enterprise by providing employees the tools like information acquisition in real time, crowdsourcing, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement.
This offers opportunity for CIOs to connect these enterprise applications with the social platforms customers are using to engage the companies they do business with. Because of the growing use of social as a customer service medium and the data and engagement opportunities it presents, it is clear that social media can no longer stand alone in marketing and with the help of the CIO, it needs to be a cultural and technological part of the entire enterprise.
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