Depending on the type of organization you are working in, (and let’s face it - the demographic of its key decision makers) you may or may not have some form of Social IT. In discussions with some leaders around this subject you can almost watch them grimace as they avoid discussing it
To a degree I can get where they are coming from. Having only recently dived into the world of social media I understand where there may be some misconceptions on what it is and what it can potentially do for internal IT purposes. Many people who I spoke with on this think that social media is more for external “marketing” uses. But consider this:
· The average time Americans spend per month on social networking 6.9 hours . (source: DigitalBuzz )
· 1 Million websites are integrated with Facebook (source:Uberly)
· 23%of users check Facebook 5 times or more daily (source:Socialnomics)
· 56% of customer tweets are being ignored (sources: AllTwitter)
· In 2012, 1 million accounts are added to Twitter everyday. (source: Infographics Labs)
· There are 175 million tweets sent from Twitter every day in 2012. (source:Infographics Labs)
· 625,000 new users on Google+ every day. (source: AllTwitter)
· Google’s +1 button is used 5 million times a day (source:AllTwitter)
There starts to be an expectation from your customers (the business) perspective on how we should be interacting with them. So it becomes clear that we need to make some considerations for this when we interact with the business or customers regarding Service Management.
In some ways your customers are already performing their own Social IT. Think about how often they will “Google” something to try and fix it before calling into the Service Desk. This in itself is its own commentary on the speed at which service is provided. To some degree you are probably doing this yourself. What if we were able to take that learning and apply it in such a way that a community of users could leverage the information?
This is where some grumblings from leadership may begin. “How do we do this, and monitor content that” you need to learn to walk before you can run.
Labels: Social IT
