Are CMOs the New CIOs?

Consumer driven technological markets have arrived with panache and by the looks of it, they are here not only to stay but to make a difference in the conventional way of marketing. After the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce and Adobe’s procurement of Context Optional parent Efficient Frontier, Oracle, not wanting to feel left behind, purchased Vitrue, a social networking platform, at a whooping price of price of $300 million, reports Forbes.

As technological giants are beginning to embrace this emerging trend, scholars and pundits of the corporate world are preaching the virtues of these social technologies and practically urging organizations of various dimensions to annex this ‘People Transformation’ in their modus operandi.

With the advent of these new technologies like Vitrue, Radian6, Buddy Media, and Context Optional, markets and technologies have come to relish a bond that is expected to get more potent with the passage of time. As such, CMO’s and CIO’s are expected to work in close collaboration in order to propel efficient outcome of using social platforms. This will help an enterprise not only to mitigate risks but also to manage and deploy data in an efficacious and comprehensive manner.

An intriguing prediction by Gartner has compelled everybody dumb – struck. It says that due to the nature of relationship between markets and technologies, in five years time, a CMO is expected to spend more on the IT of an organization than the CIO himself.

This trend has just started its journey and it certainly has a lot of distance to cover where the driving force is the maintenance of its core component – people. Market interactions, resulting in relationships with consumers are solely depended on how good driver a CMO is and how well are they able to comprehend this networking technology.

Or can Gartner predict that too?