Tag Archives: Social Media

Five tips for CIOs looking to harvest social media data

1 Reply

Individuals inside and outside the organisation now use a range of social tools to engage with the business. So how can CIOs make the most of this online conversation and use unstructured social data to help shape better products and services? Here I present a recent article for silicon.com, where I polled five IT leaders for five top tips:

Tip 1 – Identity the themes and address the customer: John Bates, CTO at Progress Software, says last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was the first example of a major company such as BP having its reputation damaged through an inadequate response to social media: “They didn’t respond effectively and they got badly hurt,” he says.

Much has been written about the oil giant’s struggle to incorporate social media into its communications crisis plan. Bates says CIOs must help the business identify underlying issues addressed through social media and find a means to deal with customer-identified themes.

“Social media is a series of events and Twitter is the medium that can potentially damage the reputation of governments and businesses. If someone says something about your organisation, you need to raise the issue and understand what the sentiment says about your business,” Bates adds.

“Social is not just about the technology. It’s actually more about the culture. The 21st-century customer understands the culture of social media. Your business has to understand why people would want to go out on to the internet and to collaborate.”

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

Twitter and customers: Talk like friends, but without swearing

Leave a reply

I recently had the opportunity to listen to Innocent Drinks co-founder Richard Reed, who went to great lengths to explain to a select audience why business leaders must recognise how a continual focus on the customer help keeps executives honest.

Reed was speaking at the CIO Connect annual conference that took place in London last week. There was loads of insight from speakers about the best way to deal with the increasing influence of the consumer over business technology, most of which will appear in the autumn edition of CIO Connect magazine.

But Reed had a particularly strong take on engagement. His entire organisation is focused on simple, honest communication with the customer. And when it comes to creating a social media strategy through Twitter, Reed’s advice is simple: “Talk as you would talk to your friends, but without the swearing.”

Rather than confusing customers with acronyms and double-speak, Reed encourages executives to “keep it natural”. Which I think is a pretty concise summary for how businesses should approach all forms of communication.

Co-op Financial Services’ Jim Slack discusses social media

Leave a reply

The finance sector is famously behind other industries in the use of social media. Co-operative Financial Services IT chief Jim Slack aims to change that situation, as my latest feature for silicon.com shows.

Financial services firms are probably not the first type of business you would think of when it comes to the adoption of social media. In fact, they might be the last.

silicon.com recently reported the suggestion that case law from 1924 prevents finance companies from publicly identifying an individual who has an account with them, which makes responding to customer queries via social media a potential legal minefield.

Other reports regularly suggest banking CIOs have been slow to adopt social media. But Jim Slack, the business leader of IT operations and development at Co-operative Financial Services (CFS), is encouraging his organisation to take a different stance.

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

CIOs share seven tips for social media strategy

Leave a reply

Here is another of my features for silicon.com, which presents advice from technology leaders on creating successful engagement through social technology:

Social networking has become a key medium for interacting with colleagues, contacts and customers. So why are some businesses still scared to let their employees engage?

As many as 48 per cent of companies still ban their staff from accessing social networks at work, according to research from HCL. The survey suggests many executives believe social tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, are too distracting from day-to-day activities.

That perception can be a challenge for modern CIOs who are charged with moderating communication channels, while ensuring the continual flow of information. Below, leading business executives provide seven tips for creating successful engagement through social technology.

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

How CIOs are hiring and engaging with staff

Leave a reply

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.

Social networks blur CIOs’ work and outside lives

1 Reply

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.

Social media pushes CIOs and marketing closer together

Leave a reply

For CIOs, one thing is certain: the increasing interest in social media means IT leaders now have to spend more time with the marketing executive. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com, which shows that a successful social strategy requires a confluence of CIO and CMO expertise:

From Facebook pages to Twitter profiles, executives round the board table will be expecting someone in the organisation to establish the organisation’s social-media strategy. While social media provides a means for the chief marketing officer (CMO) to engage with potential customers, it is the CIO who will be expected to provide the technical knowledge to make such digital marketing strategies a business reality.

“I spend more time now with the chief commercial officer, who is responsible to marketing, because of the criticality of social media,” said easyJet CIO Trevor Didcock, when asked whether he has spent more time with the marketing department during the past 12 months.

Didcock recognises the web and social media are crucial, yet he also recognises the business could do more, suggesting that many of his company’s activities – such as advertising on Facebook and recruitment through LinkedIn – are reactive rather than proactive. The answer is a confluence of CIO and CMO expertise.

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

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube: But where’s the social CIO?

Leave a reply

I’ve been on holiday for the past week. Well, I say holiday – I live in London and we visited Leigh-on-Sea for a few hours one day. The main point is that I haven’t been at work. And during that time away from my desk, a piece I wrote on the social CIO for silicon.com was published. The piece suggests that not enough IT chiefs are championing social media and collaboration:

The media consensus would have us believe that we are on the cusp of an information revolution, where everyone across the world is using Facebook to poke their peers and Twitter to tweet their views. As ever, an element of caution is required. Change is occurring but the revolution is patchy at best.

There might be 500 million Facebook users around the globe but that still leaves almost six and a half billion non-users. What lies behind such figures is a broader socio-economic change. The number of people using Facebook has doubled year-on-year and the up-and-coming cadre ofyounger employees expect to use social technologies in the workplace.

Such expectations create significant challenges for the executive team. The CIO, as the individual with responsibility for organisational IT, should be at the apex of that challenge. That, however, is not necessarily the case.

To read the full article, please click here.

Deloitte UK CIO Mary Hensher talks about people and security

Leave a reply

Summer’s recently released CIO Connect magazine featured a profile interview with Deloitte UK partner and CIO Mary Hensher, a people person with a passion for the potential of IT to change business. The feature covered the following areas:

  1. Deloitte UK CIO Mary Hensher is only too aware of the fact that she remains a scarcity amongst the rarefied air of UK business leadership; a woman with a responsibility for technology at a leading firm.
  2. There is hope that the balance will once again shift towards women, and that hope comes in the form of social media: “Technology used to be anti-social; now it’s social,” says Hensher, referring to the increasing prevalence of collaborative technology.
  3. “You need pioneers to prove that new models of working are possible,” says Hensher. “Part-time employment will not work in every job but IT should be more accommodating. Employees need to be as flexible as they can. A good working relationship can make new models work.”
  4. Information is everything. It is crucial that a central core of IT experts are retained in-house to ensure that client data is secure: “We can’t afford ignorance and managing secure data is essential,” says Hensher.
  5. Hensher says issues of security and mobility come together and create concerns around connectivity: “The challenge is to connect your people effectively,” she says.

To read the full article please, click here.

Spring 2010 edition of CIO Connect magazine

2 Replies

The spring 2010 edition of CIO Connect magazine was printed and posted during my recent paternity leave. The magazine hoasts the usual mix of business IT features and leadership profiles, including extended articles on sustainability, social media and leadership success.

As ever, thanks to all the CIOs, business leaders and technology experts who contributed their time and opinions. Below is a full list of featured participants (in order of appearance):

  • Natasha Davydova, group head of strategy for global technology and operations for Standard Chartered
  • Jody Goodall, head of research and development at Trader Media
  • Omar Haque, managing director at AxiomCSG and formerly consultant at RS Components
  • Dave Fleming, head of ecommerce and innovation at Shop Direct
  • Andrew Abboud, CIO at City University London
  • Professor Lee Schlenker, chair of emerging economies and technologies at EM Lyon Business School
  • Scott Herren, managing director and vice president at Citrix
  • Ian Pratt, vice president for advanced products at Citrix and chairman of Xen
  • David Head, director of La Fosse Associates
  • Dominic Batchelor, senior associate at Ashurst LLP
  • Inbali Iserles, professional development lawyer at Ashurst LLP
  • Danièle Tyler, solicitor at Ashurst LLP
  • Robin Johnson, CIO at Dell
  • Stephen hand, CIO at Lloyd’s Register
  • Alistair Russell, advisory services director at CIO Connect
  • Maggie Berry, managing director at womenintechnology.co.uk
  • Bobby Cameron, principal analyst at Forrester
  • David Southern, head of IT at WWF UK
  • Phil Collard, head of business and operational support at Scottish and Southern Energy
  • Tony Young, CIO at Informatica
  • Steve Palmer, CIO at London Borough of Hillingdon and President of Socitm
  • Lorie Buckingham, CIO at Avaya
  • Les Taylor, director for business development and IS at the Disposal Services Authority (DSA)
  • Robbert Kuppens, European CIO at Cisco
  • Dan Matthews, CTO at IFS
  • Myron Hrycyk, CIO at Severn Trent
  • Jane Kimberlin, IT director at Domino’s Pizza Group
  • Phil Durbin, head of IT at UNICEF UK
  • Matthew Pontefract, CTO at Glasses Direct
  • Alistair Cox, chief executive at Hays
  • Ian Woosey, IT director at Carpetright
  • Heather Corby, HR director of BT Innovate and Design
  • Eachan Fletcher, CIO at Sporting Index
  • Ian Cohen, CIO at Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group