Advances in information technology [IT] continue to change all aspects of doing business from operations to marketing, and social media platforms have been key tools in the evolution of business marketing. The widespread use of these digitized communication channels by consumers and businesses across all industries encourage greater interaction between traditional IT and marketing departments within companies. It also creates opportunities for the development of professionals with cross-disciplinary skill sets that increase their value to the companies for which they work and the labor market as a whole. Here are some ways that social communication platforms bolster skill sets and expand career opportunities for IT professionals.
Establishing Computing System Infrastructure For Social Media Marketing
The job descriptions of IT and marketing professionals begin to blur when it comes to implementing, managing, and developing infrastructure in support of social internet media. Businesses that use social internet media establish communication between itself and consumers as well as encourage the creation of user-driven content to generate authentic buzz for its products and services. These activities generally involve marketing professionals. However, social internet media is made possible through IT system development because they run on web-based platforms. IT professionals get involved with establishing and updating the company’s computing systems so that internet marketing campaigns using social communication channels can achieve their desired results. For instance, mobile computing has become the norm for social internet media users, and IT professionals make sure that their customer experiences are of the same quality of those accessing the company’s website and social communication channels from networked desktop computers. IT professionals also work with marketing departments to set up dashboards and reporting mechanisms that make managing social communication channels easier and allow marketing people to collect the right data points for future internet marketing campaigns.
Social Media Increases the Scope of Data Management
A key benefit of using social media is the metrics that can be gathered, analyzed, and used to make operational and strategic business decisions. Both IT and marketing professionals are trained to demonstrate the problem-solving skills used in data analysis. However, the ways that they use those skills are different. While marketing professionals use data to conduct market research, IT professionals must make recommendations for data management tools that can gather, store, and synthesize data coming in from multiple communication platforms. They look for enterprise tools that make the jobs of marketing managers easier and not a collection of disparate tools for separate functions.
Cross Training of IT and Marketing Professionals
While IT professionals must work closely with marketing experts to understand business requirements and deliver the right tools needed to bring internet marketing campaigns to life, they also can spend some time educating marketing professionals about the numerous features available with some of these enterprise tools. The field of IT moves at a fast clip, and system updates are frequently necessary to keep pace with either industry or consumer-driven changes. IT professionals act as technology trainers for marketing experts who use data management tools. As discussed in an article in The Business Review, as IT and marketing professionals work together and share knowledge, they discover new ways to use social communication channels to engage customers, promote brands and drive sales.
Corporate leaders and executives understand that information drives business, and technology simply makes the utilization of information more efficient. The use of social media is one way that technology has made marketing more efficient and cost-effective when employed by business professionals who understand the depths of its features.
While there are many possible approaches and areas of research for the study of social media, a review shows that only a few of these are used in extant information systems literature. The paper therefore suggests that increased awareness of the possibilities can strengthen research in social media. It is also suggested that information systems scholars can strengthen their interdisciplinary position by making the information systems discipline itself the home ground for research about social media. To address the issue of possible approaches and areas of research, the paper develops a framework that includes conceptual framing and methodology as well as research areas in the information systems discipline. First, the framework guides a review of extant literature about external social media. Going forward, the framework facilitates the development of a future research agenda about social media on information systems home ground.
Keywords
- Social media
- review
- information systems discipline
- dialectics
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Information Systems Research Group, Department of Business Administration, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark
Lars Haahr
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Department of Computer Science, University of Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark
Jacob Nørbjerg
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Haahr, L. [2014]. Wrestling with Social Media on Information Systems’ Home Ground. In: Commisso, T.H., Nørbjerg, J., Pries-Heje, J. [eds] Nordic Contributions in IS Research. SCIS 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 186. Springer, Cham. //doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09546-2_3