A visionary inventor and entrepreneur, it would be impossible to overstate Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and how we use it. Apple’s mercurial, mysterious leader did more than reshape his entire industry: he completely changed how we interact with technology. He made gadgets easy to use, gorgeous to behold and essential to own. He made things we absolutely wanted, long before we even knew we wanted them. Jobs’ utter dedication to how people think, touch, feel and interact with machines dictated even the smallest detail of the computers Apple built and the software it wrote.

Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California. He was a techie from a young age, often sitting in on lectures at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto while attending Homestead High School in Los Altos. He eventually landed a summer job there, working alongside Steve Wozniak.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972, but dropped out after six months – he later said he “didn’t see the value in it.” He eventually returned home to California. He got a job at Atari, renewed his friendship with Wozniak and started hanging out with the Homebrew Computer Club. After trekking to India in 1974 — a trip he, like so many others, made to find enlightenment – Jobs returned home and looked up Woz.

The two of them launched Apple in 1976. Their first project, the Apple I, wasn’t much to look at — just an assembled circuit board. Anyone who bought it had to add the case and keyboard. But it was enough for Jobs to convince Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel engineer and product marketing manager, that personal computing was the future. Markkula invested $250,000 in the fledgling enterprise.

The Apple I begat the Apple II in 1977. It was the first successful mass-market computer, and easy to use, too. That would become a hallmark of Apple under Jobs.

The Apple II had a huge impact on the tech business, but cheaper alternatives, like the Commodore 64 and the VIC-20, quickly eroded Apple’s market share. IBM’s open PC platform eventually won out over Apple’s closed approach, and the die was cast. The PC dominated the market.

Still, Apple was by any measure a success. By the time Jobs was 25 in 1980, he was worth more than $100 million. Not that it mattered to him.

“It wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money,” he once said.

Apple once again shook up the industry with the Macintosh, announced in 1984 with a now-iconic Super Bowl ad challenging IBM. The Mac was a revolutionary step forward for personal computing — the first mass market computer to use a mouse-driven, user-friendly graphical interface. It was influenced by – critics would argue lifted from — technology Jobs saw a few years earlier at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. It irreversibly changed how we interact with computers.

But then Jobs fell from grace. One year after the Mac’s introduction, Jobs was fired in a power struggle with CEO John Sculley. Jobs was devastated. He felt he’d let those who came before him – pioneers like David Packard and Bob Noyce – down, and he wanted to apologize.

“It was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley,” he admitted in a 2005 speech.

But Jobs realized he loved what he did, and wanted to keep doing it. So he founded NeXT, a computer company, and a computer animation outfit that he renamed Pixar. As for Apple, it faltered in his absence. The company’s stock plummeted 68 percent, pushing Apple to the brink of bankruptcy.

But in 1996, Apple purchased NeXT and Jobs returned to the company he founded. It wasn’t long before he was once again back at the helm, and Apple’s ascent began.

One of Jobs’ first moves was to make peace with arch-rival Microsoft. That led to a $150 million investment from Microsoft, breathing new life into the moribund Apple. Jobs was once again firmly in control, and this time he would make sure he didn’t lose it.

He ran Apple with a firm hand, enforcing a policy of secrecy, while instilling an unrivaled dedication to design and an unwavering commitment to quality. These things mattered so deeply to Jobs that he became a micromanager, one said to have put as much thought into the boxes holding Apple’s products as the products themselves.

Apple’s incredible string of hits started with the iMac and continued with iTunes and the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and 2010’s iPad. There were some misses along the way – Mobile Me and Apple TV – but Jobs, working with lieutenants like Tim Cook, made Apple one of the biggest companies in the world.

Jobs had always been the public face of Apple, but he began retreating from the spotlight in 2004 when doctors diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer. It was a rare form of the disease, one that could be treated, and Jobs survived. His health, though, continued to deteriorate. His liver failed in 2009, and Jobs took a six-month medical leave. He returned, but was rarely seen. He announced he was resigning as CEO in August, and Tim Cook replaced him as the head the company.

At a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Jobs shared the philosophy that drove him.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

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Like many people, Evan Cunningham spends time on Facebook and Twitter while at the office. He sends out party invitations or chats about beer.

But unlike most people, he gets paid for it. And he gets a title.

Cunningham’s job is one of the newest in corporate America: social media manager. It’s also known, depending on the company, as social media wizard, social media ninja, social media diva or just plain online communities manager.

No matter what they’re called, experts in marketing a company’s name and wares on social network sites – such as Facebook, Twitter and special interest forums – are in demand.

“This was the year when companies large and small began to realize the importance of social media, and there has been lots of investment in social media,” said Augie Ray, a former Forrester Research analyst who now handles social media for insurance group USAA.

No one knows exactly how many social media jobs exist, but a quick scan of online recruitment sites shows a bounty of businesses looking to hire.

“On any given week, we may see hundreds of new social media jobs posted,” said Kathy O’Reilly, director of social media relations for job recruitment site Monster.

The number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75 percent over the last year, O’Reilly said. About 155 positions are available a month, up from an average of 88 a month a year ago.

But what are the qualifications for the job? Cunningham admitted it’s a vague area.

“I just sort of stumbled into social media,” said Cunningham, 24, of Los Angeles. “It made it easier because I’m young, and people assume you know what you’re doing.”

After graduating from the University of Virginia with a double major in political theory and media studies, he worked in social media for several marketing agencies, where his duties included chatting with women on forums about their dry skin for Vaseline and finding celebrities willing to tweet (for a fee) about the Kia Optima.

Pabst Brewing Co. hired him in July to spark conversations about its beer and other drinks and to check social network sites for customer complaints that could escalate into a crisis.

On a typical day, Cunningham scans Facebook, Twitter and Google alerts for any mention of Pabst products. He’ll most likely find them among people who have signed on to affinity groups – for example, Facebook users who “like” Pabst, and therefore get updates, special offers and other messages that he sends out about events and promotions.

If he finds a favorable message on Twitter about a product, he might re-tweet it to all his followers on that social network, which favors brief, often non-grammatical posts. A recent example: “It’s the freaking weekend, baby. I’mma have me some Pabst.”

Cunningham also looks for comments that might indicate dissension among consumers, and if it looks like the situation could turn damaging, he’ll try to intervene before the complaint spreads.

Offline, he meets with the marketing team to integrate social media into traditional ad campaigns. When the company made a music video by celebrity spokesman Snoop Dogg to promote a new product, Blast by Colt 45, he suggested putting behind-the-scenes videos and other materials on Facebook, where they could be viewed by people who “like” the brand.

Some companies use social media staffers to boost traffic to their sites. Edmunds.com, a Santa Monica, Calif., car information site that is mostly ad-supported, has five staffers to handle its social media presence. Car buyers haggling at dealerships or confused about anything auto-related are encouraged to use Twitter to send them queries, said Avi Steinlauf, president of Edmunds.

“If there’s chatter going on in the Twittersphere about buying cars or selling cars or car enthusiasts having a conversation, we’d like an opportunity to engage them,” Steinlauf said.

With 800 million users on Facebook and 200 million on Twitter, it’s no wonder that companies are desperate to reach social media users. But it’s not as cut-and-dried as buying an ad.

It’s “more like being at a cocktail party” than a direct marketing campaign, said Tom Poole, managing vice president of digital mobile and emerging channels at Capital One Financial Corp. He said the firm is still experimenting with the medium.

“It’s less of a direct sale and more about creating a face for the brand that is human.”

There have been blunders along the way.

When Amy Winehouse died in July, Microsoft sent out a tweet encouraging fans to remember the singer by buying her last album from Zune, the company’s digital marketplace. Thousands of Twitter users responded with tweets of their own that included, “utterly tasteless,” “vile-leaches – seriously?” and “Microsoft – failing at social media.”

O’Reilly of Monster said the specialty has gone through growing pains but is getting more professional. A sure sign: Some of the gimmicky job titles are on the wane, including at Monster.

“We added a social media ninja at the very beginning,” O’Reilly said. “It was very trendy at the time, but then you grow out of it.”

Ray said it’s about time. “As a social media professional, I am personally embarrassed by all the wizards and gurus and ninjas,” he said. “It’s a serious profession.”

He also said that businesses are more often turning to marketing professionals for their social network needs rather than handing the job to tech-savvy youths. It’s a sweet turn of events for Raleigh Gerber, a social media consultant in her 40s who didn’t want to disclose her exact age.

“So many companies will just toss it over to an intern, thinking that these young people are always on social networks, so they must be good at social media,” Gerber said. “It rarely works.”

Average starting wage for social media jobs, according to the jobs search site Simply Hired, is about $55,000.

Academia is starting to take the field seriously too. Birmingham City University in England now offers a master’s degree in social media. Beginning this fall, Northeastern University in Boston will offer a specialty in social media for master’s students studying corporate communications.

“We tried to cover social media in other classes, but we realized that it’s become important enough that we need something much more in-depth,” said Carl Zangerl, a faculty teacher and coordinator of the Northeastern program.

But no matter how much the title is dressed up, the job still largely involves sending out messages on Facebook and Twitter.

“I have trouble explaining my job to my mother,” said Scott Skurnick, whose title at Edmunds is executive director of search engine optimization and social media programming.

Worse, he said, “I have a hard time keeping a straight face when I tell people what I do for a living.”

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Parise invented the Bandee, a headband women wear while playing golf and other sports. She sells her product mostly on the Internet, working from home.

Her audience is big, and growing. In a year, using Facebook, she has parlayed her reach into 15,000 fans.

For small businesses such as Parise’s, social media has become a portal to success.

“It’s really important,” said Parise, 49, of Weston, Fla. “It’s just the way the market has gone.”

No question, the use of social media by businesses is booming.

According to a recent study by EMarketers, 80% of leading companies will participate in social media marketing in 2011, nearly double the number from three years ago.

And a 2011 Social Media Marketing report by SocialMediaExaminer.com found that 90% of marketers said social media was important for their business. Eighty-eight percent said it generated more business exposure, and 72% said it increased traffic to their site.

The most commonly used social media tools, the 2011 report found, are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs, in that order.

Parise didn’t have — or even want — a personal Facebook page a little over a year ago. But she knew she needed one for business.

Now, she said Facebook is the main contributor to the worldwide reach of her sales.

“Sometimes they say, ‘I saw you on Facebook,’” she said.

When Kelly Lyles launched a website in July to begin selling her invention, Tip Top Shoe Savers, she went immediately to social media to get the word out, garner feedback and drive customers to the website.

She posted on Twitter and Facebook to pique interest in her product — small shoe forms that women can place inside their pointy shoes to prevent creases and preserve the tips.

“One person putting a ‘like’ on your product or your page reaches hundreds of people because someone will see it on their page and say, ‘I like that,’ ” said Lyles, 34, of Aventura, Fla.

What’s more, Facebook gives her a weekly update of how many people visited her site and how many people “liked” her product.

And she can link to Facebook and Twitter, so that her postings go out on both.

“So, if I say, ‘Come visit Tip Top Shoe Saver at the Summer Sale,’ it goes out to Twitter,” Lyles said. “It’s cross-promoting.”

Even more-established companies that sell to other businesses can get a boost from social media.

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The fast-paced forum is offering scientists a peek at real-time, presumably little-filtered human behavior and thoughts. Cornell University researchers turned to the microblog to study mood and found a pretty consistent pattern.

The researchers analyzed English-language tweets from 2.4 million people in 84 countries, more than 500 million of the brief, conversation-like exchanges sent over two years. They used a computer program that searched for words indicating positive mood — happy, enthusiastic, brilliant — or negative mood — sad, anxious, fear.

What they found: Unless you’re a night owl, a positive attitude peaks early in the morning and again near midnight, but starts to dip midmorning before rising again in the evening.

Aha, you might think, going to work and related hassles like traffic explain that pattern. After all, there was more positive tweeting on the weekend, even though the morning peak of happy tweets occurred two hours later, probably because people slept late.

Not quite. Work-related stress may play some role but it can’t explain why that same midday dip occurs on the weekend, too, said lead researcher Scott Golder, a Cornell graduate student. Instead, the pattern probably is due to the effects of sleep and our 24-hour biological clock, the so-called circadian rhythms that signal when it’s time to sleep and to wake, Golder and Cornell sociologist Michael Macy reported. Their study appears in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The researchers also examined tweets in the United Arab Emirates, where Friday and Saturday are considered the weekend. Sure enough, they found the same daily pattern, even though the workday tends to begin earlier there than in the West, and the same weekend pattern.

Previous research has linked the biological clock and mood, but was based mostly on small studies of American college students. There are cautions about studying Twitter postings, too: Their authors tend to be younger than the general population, and may be more affluent, better educated and different in yet-to-be-discovered ways.

Still, the study’s bigger message is about the scientific potential of social media, Macy said.

Other researchers have turned to Twitter to study political campaigning, to blog postings and Twitter feeds to study emotions, and to Google searches of flu symptoms to predict outbreaks.

“It illustrates a new opportunity for doing social and behavioral science in ways that were really unimaginable even five years ago,” Macy said.

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The decision by Netflix to raise prices on its DVD and video streaming rental packages did more than kick off the company’s slide in terms of customer happiness (and share price). It gave rival Blockbuster a rare opportunity to strike back, Twitter-style.

“In July we saw folks immediately take to social media,” Lewis explained. “We really began to appropriate the language used on Twitter and apply it to our marketing.” The company offered a 30-day free trial geared at Netflix customers, promoting it on its Twitter feed. “Dear Netflix,” a July 15 Tweet read, “we’re offering prices & 30-day trials of Blockbuster Total Access to your members #helloBlockbuster.”

The experience, said Lewis, pretty much led him to re-purpose his entire marketing staff. “Not everyone has keys to the Twitter account,” he says, but staffers who once concentrated on Blockbuster’s Web or print campaigns moved to the front lines of Blockbuster’s social media campaign.

Such new media nimbleness flies in the face of the company’s reputation as a dinosaur from the brick and mortar days. Once the go-to neighborhood video store chain, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2010, triggering a wave of store closings. Over the last six months alone, the company has closed approximately 1,500 stores. Dish Network bought Blockbuster in April for $320 million. Last week Dish unveiled a Blockbuster-branded video stream and DVD rental service.

Netflix, the company that changed video rental twice, first with its promise to deliver DVDs to American doorsteps and then with the 2009 introduction of video streaming, is supposed to be the cool one.

But Netflix’s Internet savvy was put to the test on the morning of September 19. No sooner had the company announced that it was renaming its DVD rental service Qwikster when it was discovered that the individual owning the Qwikster Twitter feed was an individual who, if his past tweets were any indication, liked to curse and smoke pot. Oops!

Then Blockbuster sponsored the word “Qwikster” on Twitter. When users searched Twitter for Qwikster, Blockbuster messaging would be the first to pop up in the search category. Lewis told Digits that Blockbuster sponsored Qwikster a mere two hours after Reed Hastings sent his Sept. 19 email informing users of the company’s decision to spin off its DVD business.

Netflix did not respond to Digits for a request for comments.

Blockbuster also started a new Twitter contest, promising a free year of service for the four best Netflix breakup stories. Over the last seven days the company has earned 250,000 Twitter impressions. Lewis told Digits that this impression number comes from a daily report he receives from Twitter that totals the number of users who have seen a Blockbuster tweet. The team has also directly interacted with 150 thousand people in its #helloBlockbuster campaign, answering questions, promoting offers and engaging in the kind of folksy company-to-human back and forth expected of corporations in today’s social media-saturated climate.

In some cases Blockbuster has used direct messages—DM in Twitter parlance—to entice users—preferably those with a large Twitter followings–to promote Blockbuster offers in return for free subscriptions. Last week that practice got Blockbuster in trouble when the editor of the video game website Giant Bomb tweeted, “So I got a DM from @blockbuster saying that if I announce I’m abandoning Netflix, they’d give me a free year. That’s totally nuts, right?” Ryan Davis then posted the message: “Hi Ryan-want a free 1-yr subscription to Blockbuster? Tweet “I’m leaving Netflix for @blockbuster #goodbyenetflix” and we’ll send the code.”

The Escapist Magazine blog, which covered the incident, wrote: “When you attempt to bribe journalists, you shouldn’t be surprised when they call you out in public”.

Lewis told Digits that the episode was the result of “wires being crossed,” adding that such offers to reporters run against company policy. “The challenge is that you often don’t know who is at the other end of the line,” he said.

To be fair, the Escapist blog also implied that a Time.com reporter also received a similar offer. When contacted by Digits, the reporter said that Blockbuster was offering him interview access, not a free offer.

Meanwhile, the video company once given up for dead continues to use Twitter to refute that F. Scott Fitzgerald line about second acts.

Netflix has given Blockbuster an opportunity, Lewis acknowledged. But that’s only part of the equation. “I like to think we have working very hard to make this happen,” he said.

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• 54 percent have Facebook fan pages
• 65 percent have active Twitter accounts
• 69 percent had company pages on LinkedIn

It makes sense that a wider and wider variety of users are joining the fray; after all, these platforms can, at times, produce results faster than a phone, fax or email, and are (for the most part) free of charge.

Despite the realities of social media and the change in how people are communicating, some enterprises remain cautious when it comes to adoption. These “anti-social” organizations understand the advantages, but believe they have good reason to resist. They see competitors winning deals and wooing prospects, but their concerns about loss of control, data compromise, compliance violations and how to effectively engage an audience stop them dead in their tracks.

These fears are all justified when considering some of the security, privacy and regulatory facts that surround social media:

• Security: Social media has become a new channel for inbound attacks such as spam and malware and for data breaches that leak confidential records.
• Privacy: Employees might post confidential data that damages the enterprise and triggers regulatory penalties (for example, an employee might expose a patient’s private health information on a healthcare media site in violation of HIPAA data privacy rules).
• eDiscovery: Enterprises can now be responsible for retrieving social media communications as part of the discovery phase of a legal suit.

Fortunately, I get to interact with organizations that are using social communications effectively and within the boundaries of security and compliance. Many of these organizations operate within regulated industries, have massive customer bases, and thousands of employees. How do they maintain secure and compliant digital communications? Great question.

They start with an acceptance of the fact that social media is here to stay. Rather than trying to shut down social media communications entirely, they manage these communications, secure them, and leverage them for improved marketing and customer service.

They then convene subject matter experts — including all social media stakeholder practices:

• Engage a team of subject matter experts to assess the security risks and business goals for social media usage.
• Treat social media governance as a component of IT governance overall.
• Define policies regarding the use of social media with regard to the company. Define acceptable use policies for employees to follow when discussing company topics on personal sites, and offer them examples of explicitly prohibited content.
• Seek tools that offer flexibility and that let the enterprise respond quickly to change.
• Monitor bellwether cases and new technology developments.
• Consider best-of-breed solutions that integrate with your existing IT infrastructure. Build on the infrastructure you have, and extend it to embrace and manage social media communications.

Use these examples provided and the “best practices” list as a starting point. With clear direction and understanding, your organization can take advantage of social media even if it has to respond to high-pressure customer demands, security and compliance. Social media can be implemented, its advantages can be utilized, and it can all be done without fear of financial loss, litigation, or brand and reputation damage.

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The announcement was made by the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) Ireland in a tweet – appropriately.

IDA Ireland’s tweet read: “Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin.”

Providing a suitable environment and a favourable tax regime, Dublin has seen off competition from other renowned cities, including London, for the chance to become the home of the new office.

Ireland’s Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton was delighted with the decision.

He said: “It’s a great win for Ireland,” adding “It shows that despite our difficulties, we have great strengths in our economy.”

While the possible number of jobs that the office will bring hasn’t yet been disclosed, the IDA’s chief executive, Barry O’Leary said that the decision was fantastic, and would ensure that the already strong digital media section was added too.

The micro-blogging service boasts huge user numbers, with 100 million logging on every month.

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According to the September study, while only 1/3 of these respondents actually received some type of follow-up after they tweeted their complaint, 83 percent of survey participants who received a follow up to their tweet said they liked or loved hearing from the company they complained about. And just under 75 percent of those people who received a response were very or somewhat satisfied with the response they received. A little more than 15 percent said they were either very or somewhat dissatisfied with the company’s response.

For the two-thirds of respondents who didn’t receive an answer to their complaint, a similar number, 86 percent, also would have liked or loved to hear from the company. However, a striking 63 percent said they would hate or not like it if the company contacted them about something other than their complaint.

“In today’s business environment, social media is having a profound impact on the level of service customers expect,” says Anthony Sardella, senior vice president and managing director at evolve24. “Businesses cannot effectively compete without being tuned in to social media to improve the customer experience. But they must get the messaging right. The best brand marketing provides responsive customer service, and does not use a customer experience event as an opportunity to sell something.”

While the study reinforced the trend of using Twitter as a way of getting a company’s attention, Sardella says all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Consumers expect companies to understand their individual wants and needs. If that’s responding to a complaint via Twitter, YouTube or the old-fashioned phone call, businesses need to have the right tools ready to listen, understand and respond,” says Sardella.

In September 2010, Maritz Research acquired evolve24, a business analytics and research firm that uses traditional and social media to measure perception, reputation and risk. Through their combined capabilities, both companies offer business clients customer experience research that is more relevant and actionable, helping companies improve their businesses and their bottom lines.

Methodology:

Maritz Research conducted its Twitter study between September 9 and 12, 2011, during which it surveyed an online panel of 1,298 US consumers, who had pre-identified themselves as Twitter users who frequently tweet, had complained via Twitter about a company with whom they do business, and who were at least 18 years of age. The survey had a maximum sampling error of 2.7 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.

For an executive summary of the Twitter study, contact Jennifer Larsen.

About Maritz Research

As one of the world’s largest marketing research firms, Maritz Research, a unit of Maritz, helps many of today’s most successful companies improve performance through an actionable understanding of their customers, employees, and channel partners. Founded in 1973, Maritz Research offers a range of strategic and tactical solutions concentrating primarily in the automotive, financial services, hospitality, telecommunications and technology and retail industries. The company has achieved ISO:20252 registration, the international symbol of quality. Maritz Research is a member of CASRO and official sponsor of the American Marketing Association.

About evolve24

Based in St. Louis, evolve24 is a business analytics and research firm specializing in the measurement of perception, reputation and risk. We analyze traditional and social media to determine our clients’ overall information landscape and provide quantitative metrics that let clients measure and report the value of their marketing and communications efforts. With this information, our clients are able to identify ongoing topics and risks that could become issues without management attention, or could become opportunities if approached correctly. evolve24 is the only provider of a complete, integrated solution based on scientifically peer-reviewed methodology that analyzes existing issues, predicts changes in those issues and identifies the emergence of new issues early in their life-cycle.

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Twitter-jacking can be a fun prank. Usually it happens if you leave your laptop open when you get up to go to the bathroom — ask my grad school classmates how I know that — or let someone use your phone, but it can take an even more entertaining turn when it happens at the hands of a disgruntled former employee.

From the looks of it, that’s exactly what happened to “Internet sales & marketing professional” Mark Davidson. Late last night, someone claiming to be one of his social media ghostwriters posted a series of unflattering tweets from Davidson’s own account, saying they had just been fired.

One of the messages reads, “So let me mow tell you the truth about @markdavidson. He can barely type social media much less know what it is.” If this person really is a disgruntled (and drunk) ex-employee — as opposed to some other kind of prankster — it’s the kind of revenge anyone who has ever been fired dreams of exacting.

Since Davidson’s profile says he’s in California, he may still be asleep with no idea that this happened — and chances are once he gets up and sees it, the tweets will be deleted, so go read them all now at his profile or below.

OK, maybe this isn’t the best professional move if, say, the ghostwriter wanted to use Davidson as a reference in the future. But in that angry, intoxicated moment it probably felt fantastic. And it serves as a reminder to everyone: if you fire one of the people who updates your Twitter account, you may want to immediately change your password.

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The short answer is that we will be in a state of high growth and rapid flux for at least several years. Where we are with social today is where we were with the Web and software-as-a-service a decade ago, and, like those technologies, social enterprise may take a decade to mature.

The exciting (and actionable) news is that compelling use cases and clear business values are emerging across the enterprise. Through understanding and embracing the Social Enterprise, CIOs will not only become better-positioned to support their business partners but start to play an important and highly strategic role in crafting how these technologies work together to drive the organization’s overall business agenda. In this piece, we will walk through the four most prominent social networks on the Web today – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ – and discuss how the unique flavor of each is best suited to different areas of the enterprise.

LinkedIn

Obvious use case: Recruiting and B2B sales. This is what everyone usually talks about when it comes to tapping the 120 million-plus professionals on LinkedIn, but there are some compelling additional use cases to consider.

Emerging use cases:

• Business development and corporate development. Speaking on stage at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference a couple weeks ago, for example, John Sabino (GE Capital’s SVP of Commercial Operations) described his high-level vision of using company social graphs on LinkedIn when mulling partnerships or acquisitions. If GE parsed through the endless fount of data, it could discover whether a new potential partner was a right fit for its own organization simply by seeing how well-connected employees were between the two.
• Enterprise knowledge management. Instead of begging employees to redundantly input and update past job experience and skills into an internal knowledge management application, some savvy HR and IT leaders are now turning to LinkedIn searches to help catalog and surface organizational expertise and internal candidates for job openings. It’s as easy as searching on keywords while limiting the “current company” field to the company name, and best of all, if the required skill sets aren’t available internally, then it is an easy next step to commence the search externally.

Facebook

Obvious use case: B2C engagement with tabs, ads and wall posts. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single marketing professional passing up the opportunity to engage with the site’s 750 million members around the world. In fact, one survey this year found that 92 percent of marketers use Facebook as a marketing tool. Despite this, today’s Facebook marketing initiatives will seem primitive compared to where we’re headed, especially when you consider recent stats, such as the 95 percent of people who “like” a Facebook Page but never return to the Page.

Emerging use cases:

• Combining search and social. Profile hypertargeting is an effective way of delivering highly optimized messages to very specific audience segments based on profile information. For example, hypertargeting an ad for women’s golf apparel to female Facebook members who list golf as a hobby on their profile. Hypertargeting finds the right person a marketer is trying to reach, but can’t optimize for timing and funnel stage the way search can. The next evolution of Facebook will layer the intent of search with the profile and friend context of the social graph. Ecommerce (or “f-commerce” as it is increasingly called) will never again be the same. Around 375 million people check their Facebook accounts once a day, so there’s massive opportunity for marketers to reach a huge set of eyes.
• Integrated social campaigns. Today, most Facebook ads, tabs and wall posts are worked on as disparate efforts, or, at best, manually cobbled together. What happens when you bring integrated campaigns to social media, driving a cohesive and pre-scheduled promotion calendar across ads, tabs, posts, and tweets at both corporate and local levels? That’s what Farmers Insurance Group does. The result? Farmers set a Guinness World Record last month for garnering the greatest number of “likes” in a 24-hour period because they were able to tap into local network effects and the higher success rate of a multichannel campaign.

Twitter

Obvious use cases: PR and customer service. The same survey cited above found that 84 percent use Twitter for marketing purposes. That said, marketing on Twitter is a different monster. In general, Facebook is the bread and butter of social networks for more private and intimate conversation, whereas Twitter is an “information network,” the place users turn to when they want to hear what’s happening in the world. And while its 200-million user network is easily eclipsed by Facebook’s size, Twitter’s public-by-default nature means there are a lot of people who never even bother logging in.

It’s this discrepancy that encourages marketers to churn out updates on Twitter like it’s their personal megaphone. Comcast, via its Twitter handle @comcastcares, relentlessly responds to customer concerns, tweeting at specific individuals that report problems with their service. If users want general updates from the company, they can follow the @Comcast Twitter account.

Emerging use cases:

• Presenting a united front. The beauty of where the enterprise is headed is the potential for seamless blending of marketing, customer service, and, in fact, every enterprise function. The Social Enterprise is by its very nature real-time and transparent. The customer doesn’t care about your org structure or internal politics. From the customer’s perspective, your brand is viewed as a single, cohesive entity and as such, customers expect a consistent brand voice and experience whether they are calling you to complain, request more information, or to place an order.
• Market research and trends analysis. R&D teams and market research firms alike are turning to Twitter to spot trending topics, ask questions of the general public, and, more broadly, to continually analyze the brain trust of their ideal target audience. Even when a formal research study or focus group is planned, Twitter can play an invaluable role in identifying high-level trends which could help refine the scope of questions, shortening the research cycle while boosting the accuracy of the results.

Google+

By virtue of its late foray into social media, Google+ is naturally the least understood of the social networks. When the service first emerged, the press had zero qualms labeling the service a Facebook/Twitter killer, but the truth is that Google’s social network is actually something else entirely. Free from the constraints of Twitter’s character count and even Facebook’s lean toward terseness, posts on Google+ can be as short or as long as the user likes, adding more depth to the conversation. Likewise, tools like Hangout and Huddle offer new takes on social collaboration.

Obvious emerging use case: Brand pages. Though Google hasn’t yet launched brand pages, the enterprise can’t wait to tap into the network. Less than a week after Google+ launched, Ford Motor  had its page up and running with a couple hundred fans. Today, over 15,000 people have added Ford to their circles. While that’s still a far cry from the company’s 870,000 fans on Facebook or even its 81,000 followers on Twitter, neither of those sites ever made an experience like this Hangout possible.Several consumers actually engaged with Ford representatives over video.

Non-obvious emerging use case: Internal and external collaboration. Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, has even suggested that Google+ could be a center for collaboration between customers and the company. It’s the site’s decision to favor longer entries, group video conferencing, and group messaging that makes this unprecedented relationship possible.

In the end, the fact remains that social media is an art. That is, there’s not one right way to do it. Different individuals don’t use Facebook, Twitter and the rest in the exact same way as all their friends. Neither do enterprises, nor departments within enterprises. The inescapable power of social networks is that they enable your organization’s employees and customers to establish real identity online, discover, and share information in new ways. Whether and how this manifests across marketing, customer service, sales, R&D, recruiting, or other departmental functions may vary. What is clear is that the Social Enterprise will pervade every part of your organization.

At this point, there is no turning back. Even in the highly regulated financial services industry, FINRA’s recent regulatory guidelines (Notice 11-39) clearly state that firms are liable for social media compliance even when their employees interact with social networking sites from home or a mobile device. For other industries, the demands on IT are no less burdensome when it comes to information security, scalability and integration, and bringing enterprise-class trust to consumer social networking sites.

With these challenges also comes immense opportunity for CIOs to play a highly strategic role in crafting the Social Enterprise. By gaining an in-depth understanding of both the existing and emerging use cases across the Big Four major social networking sites – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+- IT departments can single-handedly ensure success or failure of these initiatives and ultimately continue to shape the future of how their organizations work, compete, and grow.

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