For several years now, Perficient (@Perficient) has followed many IT professionals on Twitter, including hundreds of CIOs (many of whom are listed at on CIO Twitter Dashboard / @CIODashboard). While IT leaders make up our target market, they are also some of the most influential voices across social networks like Twitter. At many companies, these professionals are questioning and in some cases doubting the value of spending time on Twitter, yet I continue to see more and more IT leaders embrace Twitter and leverage it to become better leaders and drive their business forward. How do they do this?
Forbes recently interviewed one of the CIOs I follow on Twitter most, Oliver Bussmann (@sapcio), CIO of SAP.
According to Bussmann, CIOs at enterprise companies have multiple roles:
- Be a functional CIO: manage projects, vendors, and costs and become more efficient.
- Help the business to transform: new products, new challenges, etc.
- This is the new level of opportunity for CIOs: to become a more strategic CIO. Bussmann indicates that one of the best ways to become more strategic is to stay on top of market trends, opinions and perspectives, and one of the best ways to stay on top of what’s going on is to engage in social media such as Twitter.
The bottom line for Bussmann: Social media can help to share information, become a much more visible leader and drive business decision making in a collaborative environment. Twitter, for example, becomes:
- A place to see what’s going on, following analysts and media people. Utilize this information to bring it back into the IT organization.
- A place to bring his own experiences in new technology to the forefront and become a first-mover.
- A place where you have to be honest or the backlash can be brutal. You need to stay away from negative comments about your competition or other market players.
- A great way to share what you do every day and eliminate the black box of perception about a CIO’s very difficult and busy role.
