Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and is @obilon on Twitter. He’s also the Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY. This post was co-authored by Steve Cohen, who is the Founder of Baywood Consulting Group and the former CIO of M&T Bank. He can be contacted at baywoodconsultinggroup@gmail.com.  Marketing and communications folks are all over social media. They implore company executives not to be left behind. Your company absolutely must get on the social media train this year before it leaves the station. So they go around and get management, sales and ultimately the president of the company all excited about this shiny new thing. Then it’s time to create the magic. That’s where the technology department steps in. Sure, many of the best online marketing folks these days know how to throw around a little web coding. Maybe they even know Joomla from Drupal, but it’s unlikely that they know about what it takes to roll out a relatively new, third-party technology across the entire corporate structure.  For that they need help from IT. If you’re the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of any decent sized company, that means you will have to get involved, especially if your company is planning to implement an integrated social networking experience on its website, or create cool Web 2.0 widgets that accesses your company’s data in real-time. Whether you’re at a community bank or an online retail outlet, you’re not going to take too kindly to people mucking up your carefully planned infrastructure and data.  Below are the things that any CIO should take into account before social media technology is integrated into the existing corporate structure.  Social media empowers the individual user to manipulate or create new content, possibly drawing on your data, text, and images. In addition, each internal business line may have the desire to generate unique content that may then be manipulated and rebroadcast by customers. There’s little you can do once that content gets “out there” into the wild blue yonder of social networks, but it’s important for a set of standards to be established addressing the presentation of that content in a unified manner.  If you are developing an internal Web 2.0 site like a blog network or a Wiki, then these standards must be developed for form factors such as font styles, type size, color schemes, and placement of corporate logos and slogans. If the Web 2.0 sections of your company website have their own look and feel, then architectural standards have to be established regarding the frameworks and tools that will be brought in-house to develop and manage the new site, as well as the protocols for interfacing with existing core systems.  After stylistic and presentation concerns are addressed, the CIO must oversee the development of an internal content review and approval process. This is a critical and sensitive subject area. Most companies have a lot of trouble relinquishing control of their data and the content produced for consumer facing websites to individual business silos. The CIO may deem this approach to be a little too willy-nilly for his tastes.  To balance out the need for true user generated content to thrive, alongside the standards of the technology department, a “Czar” of content should be assigned to review the proposed marketing and product offerings. This individual needs to be knowledgeable in both the needs and processes of IT, as well as those of marketing and communications. A single point of review will also assure that development standards are adhered to, the appropriate regulatory disclosures are in place, and the terms and conditions of the product are consistent with other channel offerings.  This next topic is very much related to the process of review and approval, but is extremely important and somewhat controversial, so it needs to be addressed separately. Since an enterprise social site will presumably provide for customer feedback and comments, the reputation and image of your corporation may be put at risk as an unintended consequence of the technology. The upside of social media is that it provides a two-way channel that allows prospects and customers to come to you and interact in real time.  The downside risk is that it’s often anonymous and available to disgruntled customers, employees, and others who seek to tarnish your image or strike out against your company in a public venue. These sites have to be reviewed by scan programs as well as trained eyes to quickly remove inappropriate entries. Sometimes, when dealing with third parties, this task sounds easier than it is in practice. Prior to engaging with third party managed sites, review the terms and process for deleting offensive content.  The tricky part is delineating between legitimate complaints that should be addressed in a public forum and outright trolls that should be wiped clean. This is why if the job of culling comments falls on technologists, they will need to work hand-in-hand with customer service to tell the difference and generate a strategy. Obviously, the CIO can protect the company with tools that catch offensive keywords (expletives) so they can be moderated. If doing so, the fact that comments can be deleted if found offensive should be posted somewhere for users to read. A check box system on the Terms of Service to opt-in to this agreement might be one way to get the message across on Wikis and for blog comments, as well as when streaming comments in from third party websites like Twitter.  A social network site is comprised of many structures and sub structures. Some of these contain static information while other areas are dynamic and under the management of marketing or product staff. Still other areas contain the postings and entries of the public community. Areas that are subject to change require a change management control process. This ensures that the current production environment is documented and serves as the base upon which the next series of changes will be made. If a revision is released and it’s found to have errors, you will need an easy and reliable way to return to the most recent valid structure. This should be available as part of the change management mechanism.  As time goes on, the site must also be reviewed for consistency. Making sure that changes and new offerings don’t conflict or contradict the static portions of the site is important. Remember, “things change when things change.” If each department contributing to the website has ownership of their area and its content, then someone should look at the sum of these parts on a regular basis to make sure that the site has maintained its original integrity.  Another factor to consider is updating or modernizing even the static portions of the site so that they don’t become stale. Give the public community a reason to revisit them periodically.  A CIO must be fully aware of the impact new software will have on current systems in the corporation from a cost, reliability, availability, and capacity perspective. For example, widgets are a big deal now. They are simple to implement and have little or no impact on the current operating environment, right? All they do is take data from one website and put it in an application in the sidebar of another or interface with a core application to pick-up data.  Well, depending on the functionally and design performance characteristics of the widget, it may not be as harmless as your client departments think. As with any new application, interfacing design performance and service levels must be evaluated and monitored.  These always-on applications will increase the data load on your back-end systems, depending on the types of information they will be presenting. This is a big difference from say online banking, retail price comparison, search results, or any number of other customer interfaces that are delivered on-demand. Many widgets require open access to your data in real-time or at periodically recurring intervals twenty-four hours a day. You’ll need to evaluate the load this bears on your servers. Keeping the design team in check as to a maximum on features each individual application can offer in a reliable and timely fashion without breaking down or hogging system time is also important.  Also, don’t jump in with both feet and launch the “killer social media application” without first trying a proof of concept with a small friendly community. A thorough evaluation of the proof of concept to establish the lessons learned before launching the production into wide release is mandatory.  Every CIO is faced with the issue of supporting multiple project requests with a limited asset pool. Managing the client department’s expectations is a part of the job. You will need to put a priority order on social media initiatives with other projects competing for limited resources.  Now more than ever, both the availability of staff and project funding are scarce in comparison to the demand for new projects. It’s easy to become enamored with slick technology and the desire to be part of the new social media world, but these initiatives –- cool as they may be –- have to undergo the same scrutiny as all other projects. Whether your organization applies Return On Investment (ROI), Net Present Value (NPV), or some homegrown metric for evaluating new projects, these criteria should be applied to the social networking world as well.  The more things change, the more they stay the same. Just because social media technology is deemed to be something new and a break with conventional development paradigms, we have to apply the same standards as we do to the current applications when it comes to documentation, beta testing, and regression testing results.  Documentation of all new products, processes and methodologies for compliance with internal audit and regulatory agencies is imperative for enterprise social media deployment. We shouldn’t think that either the internal audit or regulatory agencies will view these applications any differently than others that came before. It wasn’t so long ago that we were trying to tell the audit community that rapid application development and client/server technology was different from that “old main frame world.” It didn’t work then and it won’t work now either.  - 5 Ways Banks Are Using Social Media - Why Brands are Becoming Media - 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online - HOW TO: Create and Distribute Effective Online Coupons - 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence  Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Goldmund, domin_domin, LDF
If your business is planning on full-scale social integration, here are 7 considerations your CIO should make regarding social data and consumer access.