After years of talking to people inside and outside of my company about the benefits of cloud computing, I'm truly convinced that the most important benefit is not cost reduction or the ability to have new servers up and running in a few minutes. Of course those are great capabilities that a real cloud computing environment can offer. But the most important benefit of cloud technology is the ability to move your business to where it has never been before - and do amazing things you couldn't even consider doing a few years ago.

One use case I'm happy to see the market (including large enterprises) explore more often is the enhanced customer engagement and experience achieved through a combination of social networks and the cloud. Although almost everybody understands how powerful this combo can be, very few are succeeding in unleashing the power of this synergy. Most companies are just scratching the surface in this area. In this article, I want to explore some ideas and useful guidance for those who want to dive into these waters.

1. Be smart, consider PaaS, avoid IaaS: When listening to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you should be prepared to receive and process massive amounts of data. Do you want to design a physical architecture (load balancing, fail-over, auto-scale) to handle all the data or do you want to let companies like Google do that for you? What about a private cloud? Well ... I don't even consider private cloud to be part of cloud computing. High upfront costs, limited scalability and no managed services to simplify or empower your solution. It's more like a "virtualization on steroids" than cloud computing.
2. Be nice, quotas are limited: You may have an amazing idea to engage your customer but keep in mind that all social networks have limited usage quotas. Sometimes a percentage of the daily traffic (1%, for example), sometimes number of requests per hour (something like 5,000 calls per hour).
3. Be ethical, avoid spam and things like that: Even restricted to your quotas, you must be aware that social networks don't want to bother their users because ... well, they actually need them to survive. So, forget about commenting on all posts in a timeline advertising your great new product or service. Your account may be suspended.
4. Be reserved, read more than you write: If you are planning just to read from the social networks, okay. But, if you are planning to write comments or posts in the same volume, you are going to be in trouble. Writing quotas are significantly lower than reading ones. You are going to be blocked unless you are whitelisted. Sometimes you won't even have access to write APIs, unless you explain very well what your plans are.