Social media and companies

A telling example of how pervasive technology is in our culture comes from the use of social media at companies. Marketing departments set the tone for how the technology is used, and decide what to buy. Just a decade ago, technology choices were the province of the information technology department. IT comes in to social media discussions as an advisor, particularly in large companies where management challenges like picking a technology the company as a whole should use, instead of having each department pick its own. I wrote about why in Computerworld. My story, IT ratchets up social media involvement, explores some of the reasons why. An unspoken reason (because it’s now so obvious) is that much technology is finally so easy to use that most workers don’t need IT’s expertise to deploy it.