Technology Industry Outlook

For some of my employees, they’ve actually found opportunity amongst their Facebook friends, and what that does for you is there’s that “getting to know someone” phase, especially of the sales cycle that gets bypassed because you’re in that network and now it’s straight on to the opportunity. So it’s had a lot of unintended consequences that are very positive and a lot of intended consequences, especially if you’re looking at broadening consumer-based products.

R. HANKS: Mindshare lets our clients listen to their customers, and so social media allows everyone to have a microphone. But it’s sort of like fishing in a river—you can pull up great trout, but you can also pull out an old boot and a tire. And so allowing everyone to have a microphone is both good news and bad news, because you have to go through and filter what’s really feedback and what’s psychoanalysis as people just want to share their lives with every single thing that they do during the day.

So for us, it’s a great channel to help our clients reach their customers, but we also have to be extremely careful in how we pull out that feedback to make sure it’s honest feedback, not just a bully pulpit.

S. JONES: What we’re finding is that educators are breaking down the silence that we’ve lived in before and using social media to really collaborate and communicate with each other. It’s been amazing. Our company was an early adopter of social media, and we’re just fortunate that there’s this new generation of educators that are very social media savvy and will be able to really easily adopt the collaborative abilities that social media gives them to share and to grow as educators.

WILKINSON: I’d like to circle back on education and how it ties into the shortage of talent. We’ve had some pretty good luck with internship programs from some of the tech schools and found some good talent there. I just wanted to pass that on to those of you that might have trouble finding software development talent in Utah.