ITIL® and Me

Some time ago my wife discovered the wonderful world of Twitter, which I agree is very wonderful.  One night, while reading through tweets from those that she follows (including Howard Stern, Sarah Silverman, The Onion, and Eric the Midget), she made a comment that I “just have to” follow some of the same people; their tweets are hilarious.  So I decided to follow The Onion for a while (I love the tweet “King of Saudi Arabia to people: Don’t even think about it”), and after about 1 day I quit following that feed and I’ve been happy not to go back.  It’s not that I was offended by any of the information or jokes, to the contrary I was thoroughly amused.  But with all the information coming from this one single Twitter feed, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to also read through feeds from my fellow Tweeters, which was quite the problem since, believe it or not, some of the people I follow actually provide very useful information (I recommend julesmontgo and servicesphere).

So right now IT Service Management gurus are marketing Social Media as being “here and now” and if you think of it as the future, you’re already behind.  I do agree and I have no shame in saying (or typing) that it is here and I think it’s here to stay (especially since the human psyche inherently drives to be social to gain acceptance, so it’s not going away).  However, from my experience of following The Onion, as well as following and then un-following a few other people out there (sorry, but I can only handle so much), I’m seriously starting to wonder – when will we hit Social Media overload, especially from an IT Service Management perspective?

To help give some answers, or to at least point to some possible answers, I’m going to make the statement that if you’re going to use Social Media in IT Service Management, build a strategy.  Why do this?  Since I live in the ITSM world, a strategy means defining objectives.  In other words, what is the Social Media meant to accomplish?  Are you doing it to help improve communication between IT and end users?  Are you trying to market services listed in a service catalogue?  Are you simply trying to get more business?  Are you trying to leverage commonly used Social Media platforms to get users to help themselves and reduce incidents?  It’s going to be the objectives that can help answer the question, is this working?

Now that some objectives are defined I can move on to my next question, how do you know if it’s too much?  First, with objectives you can determine if the Social Media strategy is even working.  Secondly, with some baseline metrics from your BSM (Before Social Media) period, you can now determine your costs vs. benefits.  Why is this important?  Simple.  Nothing is free, so it’s worthwhile to objectively compare the cost of your Social Media strategy with the results.  For example, paying someone to tweet 8 hours a day may sound great, but if your followers are getting overwhelmed with information, maybe only 3 or 4 tweets a day is advisable, and certainly much more cost effective.  So my very cheap and easy answer to “when is it too much?” is this – when the benefits don’t justify the cost.

On a personal level, when it comes to Social Media I find that it’s nearly impossible to calculate any cost of benefits.  With this blog, tweeting and using LinkedIn, I’ve met some pretty smart people out there and have made far more professional connections than I ever thought possible.  Hell, I’ve even managed to get one or two more followers on Twitter.  But these things are at a personal (or quasi-personal, since I work in ITSM) level, where it’s easy to feel overloaded with too much information, especially when I have a one-year-old that is too cute to ignore.  Professionally, and in the workplace, I can’t think of any organization that’s probably even nearing a saturation level of benefits when it comes to Social Media.