Customer experience is high on the priority list for many IT leaders. As I noted in a blog I posted last month, 82 percent of 100 CIOs and CTOs from companies with 500 to 10,000 employees that were recently surveyed by Yankee Group place customer experience as their top strategic priority this year.

As the economy continues to improve and companies look grow their businesses by adding new customers and retaining existing customers, it's important for CIOs, CTOs, and other executives to develop a stronger understanding and appreciation for delivering on multichannel customer experiences.

Just in case you needed further evidence that the U.S. is increasingly a nation of social networkers, Nielsen issued a study Monday showing social media usage soaring -- and continuing to replace e-mail and instant messaging.

Americans spent 22.7 percent of their online hours in June using social media sites, says Nielsen. That's a 43 percent increase from June 2009, when 15.8 percent of Web time was devoted to social media. Meanwhile, e-mail usage fell from 11.5 percent to 8.3 percent, and instant messaging dropped from 4.7 percent to 4 percent.

Do you suffer from TMI in your life? Most people would agree that the burden of dealing with too much information is oppressive. For many the amount of e-mail they receive is simply out of control. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review ("Death by Information Overload"), author Paul Hemp notes that a survey of 2,300 Intel employees showed that employees spent about two hours a day processing e-mail and those surveyed believed that nearly 1/3 of the messages they received were unnecessary. Then there’s the wasted time wondering why your e-mail wasn’t responded to. “Did the person get it?” “Did I say something that ticked them off?” “Should I follow-up with another e-mail or even a phone call?”