Should CIOs blog? Should they tweet, or otherwise engage with social media? It is a question that IT executives should increasingly ask themselves, as they attempt to fight their corner within organisations that can be sceptical about IT as a function.

Blogging, once a pastime for celebrity followers, cookery buffs, and movie fans, has increasingly become a corporate activity as companies understand and embrace the appeal of social media. It can be used as a way to encourage conversations between executives and others in the industry, and with customers. It can be used as a platform to hammer home a particular message, or to promote a particular category of product. For CIOs, who in many cases are managing a transition for the IT function within their companies, it can be a useful way to make themselves heard. It is a pursuit followed by several high-profile CIOs, including Vivek Kundra, the CIO for the US Federal government.

For years now, IT departments have been considered a cost centre within organisations. IT executives constantly have had to battle boards that are unwilling to spend money on what they see as a cash drain on the organisation. However, in the last couple of years, some companies have begun maturing to the point where they see IT as a potential centre for revenue. The savvy CIO understands this transition, and the associated requirement for a more strategic conversation between the IT function and others in the business. If organisations can be persuaded to view IT strategically – as a business partner which can help to drive growth in new and interesting directions – then CIOs can manoeuvre themselves and their departments into a more advantageous position.

A blog is one way to help demonstrate thought leadership both within an organisation and further afield. It also helps to promote a CIO personally as a strategic thinker who can be relied upon for a visionary approach. Here are our top tips to help new CIO bloggers to make their mark:

Break new ground

There are plenty of blogs that say nothing. An online platform for discussion that simply spouts conventional wisdom is almost worse than no blog at all, because it casts the author in the role of follower, rather than leader. Find something new to say, and say it in an engaging and entertaining way.

Find a cause

One way to demonstrate a visionary approach and develop a distinct personal voice is by embracing a subject as yours, and using your blog as online platform to help win over others in the industry. Think about broad topics, such as accountability, service culture, or operational security – something that will identify you as a pioneer with a passion.

Market your blog

Develop reciprocal links. Twitter your blog, and use the blog to expand on some of your Tweets. Comment on other peoples’ blogs and add value to the conversation, rather than blatantly using others’ comment sections as a means of promoting your own outlet. It is also a good idea to promote your blog in areas that will attract like-minded people. User group web sites and discussion boards might be a good example. Measuring and monitoring is part of a good marketing strategy. Services such as PostRank Analytics provide analytics services that can help you to monitor the coverage that your blog posts are getting across various social media services.

Blog short, and blog often

Short, snappy posts of a few paragraphs are better than infrequent, longer posts. Busy readers like smart, informative content that they can digest easily, but they also like to keep coming back for more. Infrequent blogs make you seem inconsistent, and will discourage people from subscribing.

Check in with HR

You don’t need to rock the boat to make some interesting waves. Even bloggers that do not promote themselves as employees of their particular company can be subject to disciplinary action if they overstep the mark and say things that may bring their employer into disrepute. It is therefore imperative that bloggers capitalising on their executive position within a particular company should ensure that what they are saying does not cause any conflict with that company’s message. It would be wise to check in with human resources and with other board members to get the go-ahead to blog as an executive within your organisation

Make your blog last longer than your job

Your vision should outlast your tenure at any one company, and so should your blog. Use a personal URL wherever possible, so that you can take your online location and your blogging history with you where ever you end up. Phil Windley started blogging when he was the CIO for the State of Utah, for example, but has since maintained it while in multiple positions and roles in the tech industry.

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• Vivek Kundra – A Conversation with Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra (itc.conversationsnetwork.org)
• Staying Under the Corporate Umbrella in the Midst of the Social Media Storm (socialmediatoday.com)

There’s a great article on Silicon.com about the dwindling interest in Twitter, and why companies should stay committed to social media. I say “great” because it’s by me :)

To read the full article, go to: http://www.silicon.com/management/sales-and-marketing/2010/03/22/is-twitter-on-the-wane-39745616/ and add your two bits to the comments.

Here’s the article….

While activity on Twitter continues to increase – the number of tweets per day is now approaching 50 million – this is largely due to an active core of one-in-five registered users who are becoming more and more engaged. According to marketing software company Hubspot, the average Twitter user in January 2010 had 300 followers compared to around 60 last July.

Twitter’s problem is adding to its 75 million users. Yes, it’s a considerable number, but in social media, scale is everything.

A report from research firm Barracuda Labs found that the number of new Twitter users grew just 0.34 per cent in December 2009, down from a peak of 20 per cent new users joining in April 2009. Hubspot’s figures show that the peak of new users was in March 2009 (13 per cent) and fell to four per cent in October 2009.

And these are not the first reports to identify the problem. A report in September last year from research firm Hitwise found that in 2008, Twitter accounted for 0.01 per cent of visits to all websites. By June 2009, this had climbed to 0.20 per cent before falling to 0.17 per cent in September.

I realise it’s pretty hard to get accurate stats on Twitter use because so many access the service via desktop software, but there is enough evidence to suggest that the number of people who want to use this social networking tool based solely on status updates which are broadcasted (i.e. you don’t really have control who follows you), has reached its limit.

Can you hear me?

Twitter users may have already noticed that it’s getting harder to be heard. Some highly engaged social media practitioners I know, tweeting many times per day, are reporting that it’s getting more and more difficult to grow their followers organically, especially with people who are genuinely interested in what they have to say. Instead, they are being followed indiscriminately by people who want to gain social capital, with a trigger-happy ‘retweet’ finger.

The problem may be that the noise has reached a threshold. The cacophony created by status updates from hundreds or thousands of people, proffering links to interesting articles, dipping into conversations half-way through and dull missives about lunchtime sandwiches, is obviously getting too much for some folk.

To filter out the noise, Twitter users tend to engage or converse with a smaller number of people than their following count would imply. There’s some science behind this – it’s called Dunbar’s Number, a concept coined by cognitive anthropologist Adrian Dunbar who posits that the average person cannot sustain more than 150 friendships. His work correlates with animal studies showing that this magic number crops up all over the animal world too.

Twitter: Not just for status updates anymore

So what should we read in to this? Is Twitter really on the wane?…

It’s hard to say just yet but one good sign for Twitter’s long-term health is that Twitter itself seems to recognise that being a tool that only distributes status updates is a one-trick pony. All kinds of social media from Facebook and LinkedIn to web giants like Yahoo! and Google are homing in on status and buzz. And they have a lot more to offer than Twitter.

This is probably why Twitter recently announced @Anywhere, which will allow Twitter feeds to be linked into other websites using a common API. These sites include AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! and YouTube.

And if you are a LinkedIn user, you’ll know that you can already get your Twitter feed on your LinkedIn profile.

Ultimately what is happening is status updates are being commoditised, which I wrote about in more detail in a recent blog post about the future of social media.

Now I don’t think Twitter is necessarily a lost cause and will go the way of Friends Reunited. It is still a very powerful tool, and one that should not be ignored by anyone working in sales, marketing, PR, customer service or product development.

More importantly, status updates are here to stay, whichever the social network they originate from.

Keep listening and reacting

So businesses still need a Twitter strategy. But really what they need is a strategy for listening and reacting to all the social media conversations about you – whether they are on Twitter, blogs, Facebook Groups, forums, Posterous and so on.

Status updates are a revelation: you can hear what people say about you and your competitors, you can discovers flaws in your products that you didn’t realise were there, and you can find out exactly where and when customers are disgruntled.

And you can act on what you hear: change the product, contact the customer, warn the helpdesk and so on. (Marketing guru Olivier Blanchard has some interesting advice on how to turn social media listening into pan-organisational acting.)

But let’s remember the Dunbar Number and ultimately, that social media is a personal media, and companies are not individuals. You can listen, you can broadcast offers, you can respond to complaints, but don’t expect social media users to want to be your friend. They can only engage with a few people at a time, and unless you have the resources to develop a one to one relationship with your thousands/millions of customers, you will end up disappointed.

You can find other Silicon articles by myself here: http://www.silicon.com/search/stewart+baines.htm and by Anthony here: http://www.silicon.com/search/anthony+plewes.htm

Here’s an extract of an article that Simon Marshall and myself wrote last week for Orange Business Services on their Orange Business Live blog…..

Social networking usage in the workplace has gone through the roof as Generation Y employees tap into social media such as Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint and WordPress to interact with colleagues, partners and customers. As enterprises explore the legitimate use of social networking tools to gain customer intimacy and improve relationships, there are a number of factors that can make deployment more effective

Corporate social networking usage has grown out of message boards, Lotus Notes and intranets and is embracing collaboration tools and the social Web to increase productivity and profitability.  More corporates are using social networking as a response to the rise in globalization and dispersed workforces, and as a way of opening access to business-critical skill sets and information. But, there are a number of reasons why corporates must focus on achieving specific, measurable objectives in a corporate-created social networking environment that encourages positive rather than negative results.

Firstly, there’s significant evidence that social networking sites blur the lines between business and personal relationships. Although this might cause inappropriate behavior as personal lives move into the workplace, it’s more likely to cause ethical dilemmas for staff and exposure of valuable corporate brands to the vagaries of individuals or user groups. Companies can therefore struggle to delineate what social networking use is appropriate for their staff without over-reaching and denying access altogether to common tools such as Web browsers. There is some evidence to suggest that Web-browsing decreases productivity, but most firms deem it fair to allow access to a variety of Web sites and social Web applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo during work hours.

Who owns social networking within the organization?

Secondly, firms can fail to effectively deal with this situation because no one corporate discipline fully ‘owns’ social networking. Sometimes the IT department has control, sometimes Human Resources oversees this function. In practice it’s best to place the technical management of the social networking domain with the IT department, but have Human Resources, Sales or Marketing report to the CIO or CEO on the business benefits of such tools. IT and the CIO must meet regularly to ensure that tools are not being misused and to maintain a common fair usage policy for all employees. Problems commonly arise where listed firms must communicate material statements to their shareholders first, but run the risk of overzealous employees doing their job for them and releasing information to the general market illegally.

Finally, firms can struggle to devise a system that measures ROI. This can stem from a lack of clear objectives for the use of social networking tools. Although interaction with customers and partners is relatively straightforward to rationalize, companies must define their own measurement system that places value on employee-to-employee interaction if they are to derive full productivity benefits. Understanding how social networking tools can be used to boost discrete corporate functions helps to define who uses which applications, and with what end result.

Common internal uses include live communication and interaction based on presence applications; staff training, mentoring and performance monitoring; project collaboration; information sharing; knowledge management; social mapping for succession planning and unified communications. External uses include public relations and marketing products, events, ideas and new services; corporate social responsibility dissemination; market or competitive research; staff productivity; recruitment; project management.

Best practice for social networking

In an ideal world, the best way to tackle the challenges of introducing and benefitting from social networking is for corporates to build their own social networking framework that includes all the productivity tools employees need without recourse to them using their personal tools at work. Software developers such as Jive, Yammer, Social Text, YourMembership.com, Select Minds, SocialGO, WackWall and Ning offer different approaches.

Industry heavyweights such as the Cisco Collaboration platform provide options for big multinationals that include telepresence, unified communications and customized Instant Messaging options. Google Wave offers a centralized Web resource for collaboration across text, video, and document creation and sharing that provides an interactive record of social networking sessions.

In order to properly deploy any social networking system, best practice dictates that:

• There be a plan in place to monitor and mitigate potential reputational risks associated with inappropriate social networking site usage
• The divide between a right to know what employees are expressing online with their right to retain privacy is mitigated, and kept in context by helping them understand appropriate usage
• A code of ethics should be maintained and updated regularly, such as this one from Marks & Spencer
• Discussion of the use of social networking in the corporation must be elevated to the board level, as it is a strategic issue.

How social media adds value

• Organizational and geographical boundaries are bridged, with corporate information and discussion taking place on central, shared resources such as blogs and wikis, rather than on email or on the phone
• Teams can easily find the information they need, because social networking adds context, tags and social bookmarks to data that helps others find it more rapidly
• Employees with specific skill sets can easily connect with co-workers through user profiles and expert searches, and gain information that helps them do their job more productively.

Social media business leaders

• Best Western sponsors ‘On The Go With Amy,’ an evolving travelogue
• IBM Bloggers are encouraged to post to the site
• Coca-Cola employee Phil Mooney blogs on Coca-Cola Conversations
• Ford has pioneered Social Media Press Releases to communicate news using a variety of formats
• Kodak has dedicated a whole site to the development of social interaction with potential customers called 1000 Words.
• …As does Johnson & Johnson
• The New York Times has launched TimesPeople Beta, its social networking community
• Starbucks is currently asking its customers how to run the company, through My Starbucks Idea
• Suppository brand, Anusol, has launched a Facebook community
• MTV has extended its brand into the lives of viewers by offering an online interactive resource called Think MTV that deals with social issues.

The full article can be found here

Many years ago I was a budding Futurist (not an Italian painter), someone who supposedly could facilitate groups through a process of imagining their own futures in whatever area of specialist industry they work in. I learned tools like Delphi and scenario planning. Admittedly, I wasn’t very good and so carried on being a writer….but the future still fascinates and daunts me in equal measure.

I’ve written many columns over the years about technology innovations and trends that would change the way we work/travel/make fun etc. The timescale is usually a couple of years. Looking back through this archive of deadlines missed (isn’t Google great for finding those articles you wish were buried), some technologies are finally taking hold. I first wrote about M2M in 2002, and while the there are tens of millions of connected devices in operation today, its not the billions I expected.

But does it really matter if you get the timescales wrong? (Admittedly, it does with catastrophic events like climate change) What’s important are ideas. So here are a few of the standout tech memes for the next 10 years, even though some are already 10-20 years old. Maybe their time has come…

• Convergence of robots, artificial intelligence and genetics: we’re all doomed said Bill Joy in his famous “Why the future doesnt need us”  - from Wired back in 2000
• Spimes and blobjects - the chatter of a vast internet of self-regulating motes. Bruce Sterling again.
• Vernor Vinge’s Singularity (concerned with transhumanism), Bruce Sterling’s repose, and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity (an update to the Age of Spiritual Machines)
• Why we should all live in cities if we want to save the natural world – Stewart Brand’s seminar at SALT
• Good Enough technology revolution (where the best fails, and the quick/cheap/dirty fix dominates) versus The Long Tail where niche rocks.
• Expanding cone of uncertainly and problems with predicting technological revolutions by Paul Saffo at the Institute of the Future

Could you recommend some other prophecies and memes for the Tens?

Data center operators, and those that use them, are under increasing pressure to go green. Demand for data center capacity is being driven up by a number of factors that make driving efficiency through green principles a complex process.

But, the introduction of new emissions laws, such as the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme makes the greening of the data center inevitable. The CRC has been causing great concern for data center professionals, who also need to save money on energy bills – as higher energy use may have tax levy implications, strengthen their green credentials to customers or reinforce a corporate social responsibility stance on climate change.

The European Union Emission Trading Scheme, and the US cap and trade carbon emissions schemes show that the greening of the data center is fast becoming a global concern.

In the meantime, demand for data center capacity remains locked into a continual growth curve, driven by a lack of consolidation of major users,such as Microsoft and Yahoo, the advent of services such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing, and the lack of power availability to key strategic locations such as London’s Docklands. These issues are in turn driving demand for ever more supply, heading towards a period where the gloomy predictions of analysts some years agoabout data centers running out of power no longer look unrealistic.

This is particularly the case where technical advances such as smaller hardware footprints, blade servers and high-speed processing density coupled with a greater need for storage capacity are quite literally sucking the life out of the power grid. As power consumption increases, so does the need to dissipate the heat generated by processing, which increases air conditioning costs – which also require their own power supply to deliver benefits. It’s easy to see how power, heat and cost are closely related and could easily spiral out of control.

Fortunately, data center practitioners can adopt a practical pathway to greening their data center or checking out the green credentials of their supplier, if they bear in mind several golden rules.

To read the rest of our guide to greening your data center, go to Orange Business Live: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-tips-for-greening-your-data-center.html

From a post we’ve just written for Orange Business Live…..

IPv6 has been talked about for so long without widespread adoption, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a solution in search of a problem: but nothing could be further from the truth. Vint Cert, co-creator of TCP/IP and currently chief Internet evangelist at Google, recently reminded us that the IPv4 addresses will run out next year or early in 2011. Its not just computers, servers and mobile devices that are gobbling up all of the existing address space: increasingly devices like the Amazon Kindle, M2M sensors and TV set-top boxes are searching for their own address.

IPv6 enables a whole spectrum of new applications across several vertical sectors. For example, cars using IPv6-enabled sensors could know, in advance, about traffic threats on the road, patients can be monitored in real time by their doctor and businesses can manage their supply chains and optimize them for maximum efficiency.

As well as allowing objects and sensors to interact with the world around them, IPv6 applies some very specific network control advantages that enhance the experience of anyone using them. Primarily, IPv6 is built to be more robust than its predecessor and this is apparent in its ‘always on, real time’ traffic delivery capabilities. Another IPv6 advantage is its support for more robust ad-hoc networking support where objects and sensors in different geographies could be moving on and off the network at any given moment, such as during a war or disaster recovery.

Network operators such as Orange have begun rolling out IPv6 support by upgrading their networks in advance of the proliferation of devices that will have their own address and a more interactive purpose in life. Industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, environment and transportation are best positioned to take advantage of the efficiencies that IPv6 brings.

To read our top 5 applications, go to the Orange Business Live blog: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-5-next-generation-apps-for-ipv6.html