Whether blogging about their area of expertise or tweeting about business best practice, more CIOs are choosing to express their views through collaborative technology. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com about the use of social media by IT leaders:

More senior IT leaders are beginning to dabble in social media and are finding new ways to help the business. So, where will social CIOs go next? Do IT leaders use social media to attract potential employees and do they use collaborative tools to keep new workers engaged?

Kcom Group started to use social media for recruitment in 2010, establishing a Twitter account for potential openings. Dean Branton, director of customer operations and group CIO at the telecoms specialist, said the organisation’s LinkedIn recruitment pages launched earlier this year and are focused on building a network of contacts.

“We have a full recruiter seat on LinkedIn, which allows us to proactively search for candidates, whose information can be imported into a PDF for hiring managers to review,” Branton said. The group’s Kcom recruitment page also provides links to relevant web sites and testimonials from current employees.

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.

The consumerisation of IT is pushing social media onto the business agenda and blurring links between CIOs and their external lives, according to my latest feature for silicon.com:

JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen is a social media fan who has encouraging words for IT leaders wondering how to straddle the gap between personal and business identities to make the most of online collaboration tools.

“Try it,” Cohen said. “Give it a go, based on the type of things that interest you. The CIO needs to lead the debate on social media for the chief executive, so it makes sense to develop your position.” Finance CIO Cohen is a prolific user of social media, tweeting about business, football and music from his @coe62 account.

He is also a fan of LinkedIn and Facebook, and has taken steps to test enterprise-ready social tools behind the JLT firewall. When it comes to the divide between business and personal life on social media, Cohen suggests the links between work and external lives are blurring at an executive level.

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.