The art of social media hype

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Enterprise social media: New battleground for CIO influence

As social media strategy becomes more important, CIOs and IT have a new lever to drive conversation with peers in marketing and other departments across the company.

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I've been observing what some IT suppliers do after I've been persuaded to speak with one of their representatives or customers and I've published comments here or on my own company's website. What I've seen shows me that some understand the value of social media marketing and others appear not to have a clue. Here's a summary of the behavior I've seen:

• Some ignore the published comments and expect that their customers and partners will find the articles on their own.
• Some publish a pointer on one media site, such as Twitter or LinkedIn , and believe that's sufficient to get people to recognize how cool they are.
• A few suppliers publish a single pointer to the article on several social media sites.
• Only a handful publish a series of pointers, all worded differently and published by different members of their staff.

I believe that IBM and CA show the most aggressive use of social media. Recently I published comments that could be seen as saying something positive about their products or services. Each of them pointed to those comments multiple times. CA has had over 100 members of both their staff and the staff of their PR firms point to the article over a period of several weeks.

While I am impressed with their use of social media marketing, I can't help but wonder if this approach is effective.  Please comment below if you've seen any of this activity and whether you found it persuasive enough to click through to the original articles.