2 Tips For How CEOs Can Use Social Media To Become Better Leaders

Social media can be a powerful tool for CIOs to become better leaders
Social media can be a powerful tool for CIOs to become better leaders
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How’s that Facebook account working out for you? Not so good? Well then, are you active in Pininterest? Tumblr? LinkedIn? Man, do you just not get this social media stuff?

Most CIOs have at best a love / hate relationship with today’s most popular social media tools. They are smart enough to understand the power of social media; however, they also feel that they don’t have enough time to take the risk and dive in to create yet another online version of themselves. Unfortunately, this means that most CIOs are passing up a great opportunity to become better leaders…

Can You Say Dashboard?

I believe that we can all agree that the Internet contains a great deal of valuable information for every CIO. In fact, much of the most valuable information is the stuff that has been created most recently.

One of the biggest challenges that I hear when I talk with CIOs is that they are struggling to keep up with everything that they feel that they need to know about. Their biggest mistake seems to be that they are just trying to monitor the web for things that are going on in their industry or at their competitors. What they really need to be doing is to be working hard to actually mine the information that the Internet can provide to them. This is the only way that they’ll be able to use new information in order to become better IT leaders.

One of the most important things that you need to realize is that the Internet already has a lot of tools that will help you to do this. Sites such as iGoogle, Google Reader, and mobile applications like Flipboard all serve to aggregate data so that you can process it quickly and find the things that interest you the most.

Help Your IT Team To Keep Their Focus

Running an IT department can be a challenge. Making sure that everyone knows what they need to be doing is one thing, helping them to stay focused is a completely separate thing.

That’s where social productivity planning tools can step in and help you out. The exact needs of your IT department are probably different than other IT departments but that’s ok because there are a wide variety of tools out there to help you out.

To start things off, mind-mapping tools are a great way to pull your team together and pick everyone’s brain for ways to address major issues. The diagrams that the department members produce can show you how best to assign responsibilities to different department members.

One of the things that the Internet seems to do a very good job of is project management. What this means for you as CIO is that after your team has used online mind-mapping tools, you can take their output and have it put into one of many different high quality online social project management applications. This will allow each team member to be able to determine what they need to be doing and when it needs to be done by.

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs need to make up their minds: are they going to fear all of the different social media tools that have become available via the web or are they going to embrace them? It appears as though they are here to stay and so you are going to have to find a way to live with them.

Social media tools have a very nice habit of evolving quickly. This is evidenced by the arrival of various news aggregator sites that will allow you to not only stay on top of changes in your industry, but actually dive in deep and find out why the changes are happening. Once you’ve created a strategy for your IT department, you can use social media tools to mind map with your team how you want to go about implementing the strategy. Once you have this determined, you can use online project management tools to track the various pieces.

When computers first showed up, some people resisted them because they thought that they were a passing fancy. It turns out that they were really here to stay. Online social media tools seem to be taking the same path. CIOs who learn how to harness these new tools will be the ones who are able to accomplish the most going forward.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that a CIO needs to establish data security rules for using online social media tools for work tasks?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What? Yet another social media tool has just shown up? Between Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etc. is there any way that a CIO can keep on top of this fast changing area? For that matter, would it ever be possible for a CIO to find a way to harness the power of social media in order to become more productive and improve how the IT department is being managed?