Social networks are everywhere — but what do they really mean to the CIO? Our experts discuss the implications, the opportunities, and the trends.
There’s no question that social networking has permeated our lives as CIOs — both on a personal front as we use these forums for communicating, and on a professional front as we put systems and policies in place to manage our organizations’ use of these communities. For my column this month, I’ve invited two social community experts within Sun to join me to discuss this phenomenon and what it means for CIOs. Mary Smaragdis, Director of Sun News Network and New and Social Media, manages Sun’s corporate activities in social media spaces, user-generated content spaces, and virtual worlds. Linda Skrocki, Sr. Engineering Program Manager for Sun's high-volume external-facing community web properties, is involved with running Sun’s high-volume Web properties.
Bob: Mary, let’s start with you. How are you defining the social community space in your role?
Mary: The social community space is about first-person
conversations on the network. Within Sun’s social community spaces,
people are conversing about their work and their passions around work.
They use these platforms to engage their stakeholders, whether they are
customers, prospects, media, or others. The network dramatically
elevates these conversations so that they reach huge potential
audiences.
Linda: My responsibility is to enable those conversations
Mary just described. When we open up a conversation to the marketplace,
we need to have the toolsets to enable it. Sun has a variety of social
community participants — some are very savvy technology-wise and are
comfortable with social media tools. Others aren’t. So we provide tools
and training to maximize peoples’ time with these media. Social
networking, blogging, and wikis aren’t for everyone all of the time.
And while we have a very liberal policy, we have usage guidelines so
that people learn when it’s appropriate to use a blog as opposed to a
wiki, for example. Because of this safety net, employees feel
comfortable having organic conversations in the marketplace — which I
think has been a huge factor in our success in this space.
Bob: What guidance do you give when adoption of these tools varies based on geography, language or even age?
Mary: Social media sites like Facebook and MySpace are most
well-known in the U.S., but there are dozens of social media platforms
around the world. As a CIO looking to extend your conversations to
these places, you’ll want to understand the equation for adoption on
the different platforms in different geographies.
As for age, MySpace and Facebook started out in a younger
demographic, but have moved beyond the millennials. Certainly younger
age groups have been more liberal with putting their information out
there. Older age groups still tend to be cautious. This is a big
transition — much like email was — and people are becoming more
comfortable with how it works. This is just the next evolution of
communication tools — for business and social communication — and there
is definitely an adoption curve across geographies and age demographics.
Bob: What are some benefits of embracing social communities in terms of engaging customers, prospects, and investors?
Linda: Wikis.sun.com
has proven to be a powerful tool for Sun employees (tech writers,
engineers, etc.), who are globally distributed, to collaboratively
create and iterate technical and program-specific content with
customers, partners, and other members of the community who share
common interests.
Blogs.sun.com
has been an amazing success story for Sun. One of the primary reasons
is because we’ve created a set of guidelines for employees to follow,
thereby keeping Sun and the employees out of trouble. Over 10% of our
company is blogging. We have 4,500 bloggers who have posted 137,000
entries. Within those entries, we have 153,000 comments, which tells us
that there really is a two-way conversation happening.
Another success area is forums.sun.com
which is one of our oldest and biggest communities. This is where
people interested in Sun products can converse and help each other. It
is a community-driven environment for users to get quick answers and
engage with other users who share a commonality — usage of a particular
technology for example. Over 4 million messages by approximately 1
million contributors are posted there.
Mary: To add some numbers to that, in the past 12 months,
Sun’s bloggers have pulled in more than 8.3 million unique visitors.
Forums.sun.com has seen more than 15 million unique visitors.
Bob: Those bring home some powerful examples of how these
technologies can benefit both companies and individuals. I know from my
own IT staff that blogs, wikis, and forums, even Twitter, allow them to
reach support groups that otherwise they may have had to pay for, so
we’re certainly using these technologies to drive down costs.
Once a company has decided to engage in social communities, what are
the areas a CIO needs to think about as they begin preparing their
organization?
Mary: There are two areas that are critical to success. The
first is determining, as an organization, if you are prepared to be
good contributors. Do you have a clear understanding of what the
thresholds are, what the guidelines are? Sun’s guidelines of public
disclosure have been held up as a benchmark and I encourage folks to
take a look. The other key area is the infrastructure itself. How is it
architected? Do you build it or host it yourself or outsource?
Linda: I agree. Policy-wise, it is important to identify your
risk and transparency tolerances. You must keep in mind that this is
part of your brand. Identify how often you are going to participate
from a time-investment standpoint and then get training and evangelism
to support that. Then, you need to analyze what kind of infrastructure
you want. Do you need full control over your scalability, uptime,
performance, feature set, and data or can you get by with using third
party provided services? Can you afford to not have full control over
your data and the availability of your site? Could you afford to lose
all your data if someone else controlled it and lost it?
Bob: That brings up a good point. Many people consider these
tools to not have critical business value and place them in the
category of “interesting.” My advice, for all the reasons just brought
up, is to treat them as mission-critical business applications, if for
no other reason than issues of privacy and data control.
For the average CIO, who are the key stakeholders across the company
that you should get engaged with as you adopt social media strategies
and policies?
Mary: Definitely your CEO, because he/she can influence the
success of your program. Jonathan Schwartz set a positive tone early on
with bloggers. He blogged in a very open manner and left his comments
section open for folks to read. We also engaged our privacy folks as
well as folks in trademarks, export, legal, and HR.
Bob: What are some common pitfalls you’ve seen?
Linda: People sometimes forget that these tools are for
organic conversations — not one-way publishing platforms for contrived
messaging. Trying to over-control or command the conversations of a
community would be considered misuse.
Bob: What is the trajectory both for CIOs and businesses at large as they think about this space?
Mary: These trends are well-entrenched and will continue to
grow in the trajectories we’ve seen. The models we have for
communicating and collaborating are increasingly becoming anchored
around technology. The choices CIOs make will have ever-increasing
reach in terms of how future models need to be anchored. This will be
the way we communicate, collaborate, exchange, and engage in commerce
for a very long time.
Linda: And I would add that people need to be open to new
technologies. Blogging came out and people loved it. Then
micro-blogging came out. Once that happened, there was a question about
whether blogging still had a place. There still is a place for those
more in-depth conversations. You can only say so much in 140
characters. My advice is to be open and try the new social technologies
as they come along, but don't feel compelled to use every one.
Bob: That’s terrific advice because one thing is certain —
change. Twitter may be big today, but something new is around the
corner. So my advice is the same — stay open to new ideas and
technologies and stay abreast of what’s going on in the marketplace.
Thank you all for joining me this month. Until next time,
Bob Worrall
, a group blogger, a behind-the-scenes blog helper (for friends, interesting people & high profile people with a blogphobia), a blog trainer, a blog site admin, but never an invited guest blogger...until now!
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In my 
Similar to how consumers 50+ years ago bought from the local mom and pop shops because they knew the shop owners and the small town chatter was the product review system, we've all become digital influencers and base our purchases on reviews we share at lightning speed -- only now the "small town chatter" happens instantly and globally.
