It's a question that's been the subject of intense debate within many companies - who is (or should be) responsible for an organization's social networking efforts? There are a few schools of thought on this.

When organizations first began launching Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts a couple of years ago, a widely-held belief at the time was that oversight of a company's social media efforts should be handled by one of the communications functions such as marketing or public relations.

As social media strategies have begun to mature and companies attempt to leverage social channels to monitor what customers are saying about their brands and products and respond proactively to potential support issues, other corporate functions, such as sales and customer service, have become more actively involved.

Most people I talk to on this topic argue that as social has become pervasive throughout the enterprise, these efforts won't be managed by a single function. However, governance of an organization's social ventures will still need to be administered by a horizontal function, such as the office of the CIO.

There's certainly some logic to this philosophy. Social has extended to nearly all corners of the enterprise. For instance, an increasing number of companies are drawing upon social media channels to gather and act on feedback from customers and partners on new product ideas and other sources of innovation. So in addition to sales, marketing, PR, and customer service there's also an R&D and product development component. Social has even seeped into back-office functions.

Meanwhile, other companies are taking advantage of customer communities where customers provide each other advice and support to resolve product and service issues. Support that arises from these communities helps alleviate customer service traffic volume for companies that encourage or guide their customers to explore them.

Social media is used by people for a lot of different purposes. It's a communications vehicle for the exchange of ideas and information. As such, some argue that a Chief Information Officer should be responsible for social governance within the enterprise. Others contend that social should be viewed as another communications channel for companies to connect with customers and business partners and therefore should fall under the domain of the CMO.

How do you see it?