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Network engineers, social networking and IT management

Social networking sites can often fill IT departments with fear yet the technology also can offer companies more avenues to customers and community.

Based on a history of personal challenges with accessing the technology I need to do various jobs over many years, I’m thinking the explosion of social networking technologies must be sending chills up the spine of many an IT manager.

In the past, say 5 years ago, I would obediently agree with a given IT group that my exploring new means of community or online discussions might be risky for companies – either in regards to pure technical security but also in the sense that if I am out there chatting away how does that make the company look. (Yet just to clarify, in my line of work, I am kind of required to be out there chatting away – even if it’s mostly in written form.) But in 2010, I am now certain the opposite is true. For many companies, restricting employee access to or participation in social networking could cast a negative light on companies, especially those that want to appear to customers as though they are on the bleeding-edge of technology.

As long ago as 2008, industry research firm Gartner warned companies against completely restricting access to social applications and participation in community sites.

“Organizations should not shun Web participation for a fear of bad behavior, but instead they should anticipate it as part of the social experience and formulate a multilevel approach to policies for effective governance,” a Gartner press release reads.

And more recently a Pew Internet study showed that in 2009 close to 50% of adults over the age of 18 use a social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin, up from 8% in 2005. More research from Pew Internet shows that 11% of adults in 2009 use the micro-blogging site Twitter, and 76% of those Twitter users read their news online via their mobile phones and 31% read the paper on their smartphone or cell phone. And a report in The Economist on social networking suggested that social-networking technologies would help businesses looking become more global by connecting employees, partners and customers for the purposes of faster collaboration.

All this data just goes to show that how people consume content and information has changed, and IT needs to evolve to support that but can also take advantage of the revolution in social networking. High-tech workers have long relied on discussions about products, technologies and vendors in online forums and social networking takes that a step further. But for companies in technology, being social could also help raise their profile with customers.

Recently, the social media site Mashable posted a list of companies with the “most social employees,” tracking activity on sites such as Twitter. The Mashable list was based on published findings from sales and marketing database NetProspex. Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple landed in the top 10, while the likes of Cisco, EMC and CA Technologies ranked in the top 25.

Can social networking help IT get the message out to its internal customers? Should IT departments explore social applications to help delivery IT services? Leave a comment here or let me know what you think at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

Speaking of social networking, do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here.

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