Workplace Slideshow: IT Unleashed: How Your Workers Influence Consumer Opinion

IT Unleashed: How Your Workers Influence Consumer Opinion

6.2 percent of users online account for 80 percent of impressions about a company. These are influential "mass connectors."

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537 is the number of followers that a typical mass connector will have, compared to 133 for other social-network users.

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18,600 is the number of impressions that a single mass connector will make within a year. There are 11 million mass connectors in the U.S.

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24 million people in the U.S. are "mass mavens," those who make lasting impressions about organizations via blogs, forums, etc.

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54 is the average number of times a year that a mass maven posts content about products and services. (A typical consumer only posts six times a year - if at all.)

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89 percent of "influence impressions" online are posted by 18- to 44-year-olds - meaning the users influencing opinion are likely in the same age demo as your IT workforce.

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Unleashing IT Employees This is a challenge for CIOs: It means employees come up with solutions. The manager's job is about supporting them.

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Unleashing IT Employees They're out there on sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, with a frontline view of what customers, and employees, really want.

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Two Ways IT Can Improve Customer Impressions 1. Create inexpensive but effective online customer-service improvements 2. Build/administer social apps to cultivate employee innovations/idea sharing.

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Always Evaluate Don't approve employee-empowered projects en masse. Require workers to conduct "Effort-Value Evaluations" first.

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Effort Value Evaluations "Effort" evaluation means your employees map out associated costs, time needed, etc. - and whether resources exist or must be acquired.

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Effort Value Evaluations "Value" evaluation means staff must provide sound projections of revenue, cost-savings, productivity, and customer delivery.

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Organization evangelists. Tweets like "I saved $$$ thousands through green IT project" cast your corporation in a positive light to the general public.

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The Value of Unleashed IT 1. They say "yes" to projects instead of "no."

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The Value of Unleashed IT 2. They focus on customer-facing operations, as opposed to exclusively serving the workforce.

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The Value of Unleashed IT 3. They help the organization drive innovation.

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Unleashing Mistakes to Avoid 1. Failing to constantly articulate what the final outcome of the employee-empowered project/effort is supposed to be.

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Unleashing Mistakes to Avoid 2. Discouraging experimentation - and even failure. Expect failure and seek to extract lessons from the experience for employees to share.

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Unleashing Mistakes to Avoid 3. Working in a silo. Success requires other departments to be on board.