Leadership in the time of Social Media
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends
(Cross posted from Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0)
As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.
In such times – specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds – what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.
Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.
They are:
- Openness and Transparency – In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity – both within and externally
- Conversation – It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else – they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA
- Content – Leaders must realise that their organizational brand and product brands are what users interpret – and that they cannot control it. Indeed, they must actively work to give it away – understanding that there is nothing so powerful as an idea owned by the users. How can you as a leader encourage content and conversation creation, both within and externally to the organization.
- Collaboration – Leaders of hyperlinked organizations know that people and groups cannot do things independently anymore- they have to collaborate with partners, other employees, other stakeholders to create lasting impact. Their own behavior sets the tone for all their employees, so they must be and be seen to be collaborative.
- Communities – Leaders understand that people -internally and outside the organization – are part of shared interest groups – around various ’social objects’. For employees that could be “how we use this cool tool to solve problems” to “employees who like football” – and externally it could be “people interested in the benefit our product gives” – and if you are a certain kind of organization, you could have communities around your product too. As a leader you have to understand the deep universal desire of people to connect around a certain shared passion. Identify what ties in to your objectives, and then understand how to facilitate it – give it sustenance. What are the tribes who you will align with?
- Collective Intelligence – Leaders know that when communities have conversations and collaborate, new and better ideas get generated. They might be better than the ideas the firm comes up on its own, and there is no shame in admitting it and embracing it. This is the pinnacle of giving up control and becoming part of the community yourself.
The question is – are you as a leader ready to make the transition?
Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides
BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE
The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)
Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.
Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.
Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”
“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.
“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”
Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”
“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam
“Yes true” agreed Sumit
“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”
“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.
“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”
“Such as…?”
“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”
“Really…?”
“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”
“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”
“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”
Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies
Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
Shared in the flow workspaces to enable Team Work Effectiveness
THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)
Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.
Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.
Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.
“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Gautam reassured Sundar that many organizations shared his dilemma. The nature of our work, especially knowledge work, has dramatically changed while our communication toolkit hasn’t.
“The model for email is offline filing systems,” Gautam explained to Sundar. “The system of Inbox, Outbox, Drafts? They spell the “I do my job, and now the ball is in your court” – There is little sharing of contexts – people don’t really write about the attachments they send or what people have to work along with.
So I’d tell Sundar Raman that what Alacrity Legal Technologies that what they need is for groups to work together in “Shared In The Flow Workspaces” – In The Flow to signify a natural way of working and not something that has to be done externally or in addition to ‘regular work’.
The Governance aspects of such a system would adhere to workflows, have access rules and align to the team roles in the group.
Some of the features that would be needed, and the behaviors that ALT would enable in such shared workspaces are:
- Wikis - these are shared pages which anybody who has access to can add and edit text, images and even video. People can add links to internal and external sites and keep a track of changes made by people. So one can say goodbye to confusing version numbers when more than 2 people are working on the same document.
- Content Repository – This is a shared drive/folder where all relevant files are tagged by the group and it is possible to search them
- Microblogging / Status Updates - helps people keep others informed of what they are working on, what issues they are facing and therefore
- Project Management – Helps people to assign roles, tasks and in calendaring timelines of when they are supposed to get back with work
Using these tools, and understanding how to manage the change process from current ways of working – ALT can make its teams work faster and more effectively.
Using Social Technologies for Organizational Innovation
Posted on 25. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
Kickstarting an Innovation Mindset in the Organization
Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.
“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”
Social Business: Creating a Foundation for Growth
Posted on 25. Nov, 2009 by Dave in Announcements, How To Guides, Ideas
Three realistic tips to help optimize your social media program.
Article continues here.
Social Media in India: International Software and services company review
Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews
Software and Services companies have been believed to be making good use of social media for their marketing and promotion. Our research on the Fortune 50 international companies in India not just confirms this but also shows that these companies have made special efforts for Indian customers. Hence in this blog we will review the social media efforts of these Fortune 50 international companies in India.
The Fortune 2009 lists IBM (#28) and Microsoft (#49) among the top 50 in the software and services sector. Interestingly both the companies have customized social platforms for the Indian consumers. While Microsoft targets the Indian social web with Mera Windows, IBM has an India Page for IBM Smartmarket to target the Indian SMBs (small and medium businesses)
IBM Smartmarket
IBM smartmarket is basically a social commerce platform targeted to SMBs. This platform is specifically designed as a one stop shop where SMBs can find vendors for their required software products, thereby reducing their research and purchasing costs. IBM smartmarket has an India website customised for Indian vendors and clients. Here members can research available software in their industry area and read product information, reviews, ratings etc. Members can also get their queries answered by other members regarding the specific product, compare different software, rate software products and write their own review. Smartmarket also gives access to online product trial and purchase. Moreover there are expert blogs, community forums and a separate blog for it’’s India webpage called India Insights to learn and discuss. That said however there are certain questions which still are to be figured out, like how do these vendors get on the social commerce platform? How does IBM make money from Smartmarket ( if it does) ?? How does one software gets listed above others in a search? (it does not appear to be sorted in terms of ratings)\n\nOverall IBM smartmarket is actually a smart move to engage SMBs on IBM platform. However a social commerce platform can be more than this. For example Xbox XNA community allows third party developers to develop applications which can then be curated and purchased by the community. Wishpot allows users to create their wishlists of the products they want to purchase in future and others can collaborate to suggest the best offers, places, products and prices etc.
Mera Windows
Mera Windows is Microsoft India’s effort in the social web. Presently this community is very actively being used for the promotion of Windows 7 in India. The community platform holds many interesting features like a blogroll of expert blogs and news feed which aggregates the latest updates on the homepage. There are also discussion forums with discussion ranging from ”12 common Windows 7 problems solved” to ”how healthy is your PC battery”. The community recently hosted the launch party of Windows 7 where all community members were given free invites and a chance to get the RC version of Windows 7 uploaded on their notebooks, which is a good example to leveraging an existing social community platform for promoting an offline launch cum trial event.
We can see Microsoft India is on the right path and has made some right decisions in its social business strategies. However a community of Microsoft Windows in a market as important as India deserves more engagement from the consumers. Microsoft has already set many benchmark examples in social media like Microsoft Dynamics Community for an SMB network and Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) award for an advocacy program and hence in the near future we would like to see similar efforts from them for the Indian social web.
Community Platforms: What makes a good one?
Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by karthick in Reports, Reviews
How do you categorise and cherry pick the best community platform? What would be the baseline that you would target? This the purpose of the post and what follow sis an analysis of what we have put together.
The breakdown.
First a definition is in order. What is a Community platform?
A community platform refers to the community platform “tool”. This is a tool (open source or otherwise) that enables people to build their own community networks or groups. So if I wanted to start a community for Kawasaki Bikes or Micheal Jackson dance moves club, what is the community platform tool that I should look into?
That’s my purpose in the series of blog posts that will follow. I plan to analyse a bunch of various tools, each bringing it’s unique features to the table, and then see what would broadly fit your (and well mine too) needs.
The Methodology of Analysis.
When one looks at a community platform, there are a range of things that comes to mind almost immediately. The first and foremost guiding principle in all of these platforms is the vision of the platform. To allow for user engagement and to do it seamlessly. That’s the broad picture, however , there are a lot of things that have now almost become standard (thanks to the large social networks like Orkut and Facebook) for communities in terms of features and new companies entering the market (for community platforms) as well as the ones already existing have to introduce them as basic options. So these features would be bundled in one area and then we have some features that we need to look at. Without further ado the 10 points that we are looking at.
1.User Features
This would be a no brainer. If a community cannot provide features that allow for sharing within a group of people, there’s not much to look into. Features I would say are important to look at? Here’s a quick check list of other features a community platform should look at incorporating.
* Detailed profiles (adding avatars and information)
* Formation of Groups
* Addition of friends and members to the group
* Relationship types between profiles (choose person as friend/buddy/casual acquaintance)
* Gallery option – Photos, Videos, Audios upload and download options
* Forums or Message boards for community discussion
* Blogs (individual and group authorship)
* Instant Messaging or offline messaging.
* RSS feeds – importing and exporting from groups or profile tracking updates.
* Search – within the community and specific groups.
* Widgets to enable display of relevant information
* Wikis and collaborative document sharing options.
* Tagging of posts, blogs, communities and threads.
* Event organisation and reminders.
* File Sharing for all types like .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .zip
* Email notifications for new users registered and any personal interaction.
* Polls to curate content or discussion within members.
* Bookmarking of discussion threads, profiles, updates etc.
* SEO’ed URLs of posts or groups (to a public community)
* Embedding options for content from other social networks.
Pretty exhaustive right? I’m sure you can add to that list to let me know what I missed out on. You’d also be amazed as to how quickly all of those points mentioned above are becoming benchmarks for good community platforms.
Functionality
Every community platform should have good functionality and should be enabled. Broadly this means the framework they are built upon and the availablility of that framework. Would open source frameworks then score higher than all? Not necessarily. We need to see how functional the community is once it’s set up. How easy are the interpersonal relationships between various groups. What is the cross flow of information? Can it be scanned easily?
Admin Controls
Good administrator controls allow for moderation of groups and communities and sharing and keeping access controls that help the community to be moderated well. Broadly these are some of the features I would look at.
OpenID/Social integration – One easy access login to the community.
Facebook/twitter API integration- the rage is to use your facebook and twitter logins making the integration necessary.
Theming/design – Any good community needs to offer users the chance to build custom themes and design.
CMS extensible functions – Allowing the platform to act and enable content management.
Network privacy settings – Everyone wants a secure network don’t they?
Advertisement display control- What ads can you filter, what sizes can you display, can you turn them off?
Portable Data – If for some reason we want content to be bundled and posted elsewhere.
Cost of the package
This hardly requires an introduction and it is a reason the public has taken a love for open source platforms – because they are free. But when one would like far more options than what’s put up and doesn’t have the time to personally wait for others to offer them solutions, one has to invest in a platform that offers custom service at a price. The price should justify the features offered. The other factor related to price is the bandwidth or spacing offered by the platform. Some self hosted platforms offer limited space for files and content to be uploaded while others seem to offer large enough storage spaces for media. Other smaller factors would be what is the file size limit for sharing and uploading and whether access controls are provided to make them public or private.
Popularity
Who is using it? How many people recommend it? What is the user database. All valid questions to ponder over and consider as a measurement factor.
Extensibility.
Cross API integration/management is something that fast requires looking into. With many different functions required out of a social network and new terms like lifestreaming coming into the picture, a robust community platform would have to provide or have a vision of what the future might be like and model their platform to incorporate that. In keeping with the times and technology, one ensures users don’t migrate as soon as something new comes out.
Analytics/Tracking at the backend
Almost a given pre-requisite to monitoring member usage and traffic to a website hosting the platform, analytics give us a good flow of information, tracking and statistics on user behaviour. This also lets us know what features are relevant, what aren’t good enough, what must be enhanced and the like. While powerful analytics tools like Google Analytics are available, a custom made one measuring not just the traffic but many other things would prove very useful.
Mobile, web, desktop clients.
I predict that in 5 years time, we will have almost no need for the computer and everything we do will be in our hand held mobile systems which would be powerful mini computers in themselves. A community platform that lets people stay connected with a mobile enhanced version so it works across browsers of the mobile OR allowing for a mobile version of the download would most definitely push them up the points ladder in the community platform rankings.
In the course of the next few weeks, we’ll take all the tools we have found (a large number giving us an extensive view of the space) and categorise them broadly on these parameters. We are eager for comments as well and sharing your experiences with various community platforms too!
Trends towards Open Organizations
Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends
Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus and wrote it in his book The Living Company. These days, however, now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.
We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today’s culture.
Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:
- Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don’t have access to information that they need to really do it well.
- Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition
- Collaboration: As organizations move to more and more knowledge based work, the output that groups of people working together achieve is exponential to what people can do individually. However, collaboration does not happen in a vacuum. It starts with people’s willingness to collaborate aided by the way work is structured, processes are defined and the tools that are available to help people connect and work together with others
- Sharing: Today’s youth has grown up with social networks where sharing information and pictures is the key to connecting and relating to others. It combines expression and relatedness – considered by many to be the two fundamental human drivers. To really engage with and to leverage the strengths of these younger employees – who are India’s post-liberalisation generation – they would have to enable these aspects in the workplace too.
Originally posted on Gautam on Organizations 2.0.
Three Scenarios: How Can Indian Firms Leverage Social Technologies Within the Workplace?
Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.
A TYPICAL CONVERSATION
Ever since Gautam joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.
The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”
During initial discussions with Gautam, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.
In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.
SCENARIO 1: PRODUCT INNOVATION
Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.
Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.
“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”
SCENARIO 2: TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.
Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, was concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seemed to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the reason why this was happening was that the nature of serial processing that the work required meant that a delay in emailing (due to whatever reason) would impact the final output by a large extent.
Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.
“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”
SCENARIO 3: BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE
Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.
Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.
Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit and Shalini, Sumit explained his dilemma: “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years. If we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Now that the stage is set in all the three scenarios, you must be wondering: what happens next? Find out in our next three posts.
Media and Publishing: New Social Tools Worth Noting
Posted on 11. Nov, 2009 by Dave in Announcements
What Condé Nast could have learned from Meredith Publishing, iVillage, MTV’s Guarida Azul, and Belo Interactive.
Article continues here.
2020 Social builds and nurtures online communities for Indian and international clients, connects their customers, partners and employees, and helps them achieve their business objectives.
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