IT Leaders: Tech skills key to harnessing social media

Since the emergence of Web 2.0, user-generated content and social networking web sites have been instrumental in changing the way people use the internet to communicate, and businesses have had to evolve to accommodate these changes.

Businesses are using social media to engage with their target market, to promote products, respond to customer feedback or generally enhance their brand. But as these are, broadly-speaking, functions of marketing, what role is left for the IT department and which IT skills are required to create a strong presence on the social networking sites?

According to Simon Bennison, marketing manager at digital agency Alienation Digital, the extent to which an IT department gets involved in an organisation’s social media strategy usually comes down to resources.

“In a small firm, social media will be looked after by marketing, or an online marketing person. But a larger company will often employ someone to monitor trends within social media data, and this requires technical knowledge,” he said.

Meanwhile, Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist, suggests that a social media strategy should bring the IT and business together.

“Wherever the line between IT and the business is, it’s very blurry, and that’s not necessarily bad. It takes the two to work together on an ongoing basis - that’s universally a good thing,” he said.

IT staff can use their skills to support and develop an organisation’s efforts in social media in many ways, by implementing software to mine data on social networking sites, creating queries and analytics to group and assess consumers’ opinions on what’s being said about the firm and even to provide helpdesk support for IT products via social media sites.

Perhaps the most obvious move for IT professionals in terms of developing a social media strategy is to integrate Twitter and Facebook into their web site.

Andreas Pouros, CIO at search and social marketing firm Greenlight, said: “Everything that a business says and does within social networks has to be represented on its web site as well. This presents a challenge that lays squarely with the IT department.”

And this work can require an array of technical skills, many centred on programming languages and frameworks. These are needed to create and implement applications to mine social networks, and the most common are .Net and Java-based frameworks, along with various scripting languages that work in either or both of those environments.

And according to Curtis at Accenture, most IT professionals leaving university today are already equipped with sufficient technical knowledge.

“We hire tens of thousands of highly technologically qualified people every year and many of them come to work from day one with the programming and system skills required.

“Obviously, a good level of familiarity with the key sites is just as important as the technical know-how,” he added.

Curtis argued that this usually means younger people are better suited to roles that focus on social media. “Young people have grown up with social media - for them, it’s just part of everyday life. They’ve grown up with it rather than it being something one learns about later in life,” he said.

However, Suhela Dighe, head of social media for storage vendor EMC, questioned this, stating that those with limited experience in the working world may not have the business acumen to be able to use social media to further a business’s objectives.

“Young people may have a passion for social media as well as the technical skills, but they don’t have the business experience,” she says.

“Social media is basically a new channel for engaging with external customers and stakeholders. Don’t leave it up to someone who doesn’t understand the importance of those relationships.”