2020 Social: Because Business is Social

Getting your organization ready for Social Media with a Policy

Posted on 03. Jun, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Trends

My colleague Dave Evans has written a great article on Clickz about how critical it is for businesses to set up social computing policies.

I quote:

Current social computing and social media policies range from an outright prohibition of employee participation on the social Web, including at home (yes, some firms do this), to the more open – and very much informed – use of social media by Zappos, Dell, and IBM. Zappos encourages employees to participate. Dell builds disclosure into the social media handles of employees: “@StefanieAtDell” runs @DellOutlet. IBM’s policies clarify that employees using social media should refrain from using “we” and instead use “I” when publishing posts or comments that might relate to the workplace. At SAS Institute, employees using Twitter include a statement to the effect “these views are (mine) and not those of SAS” in their profile.

These are all solid examples of how to smartly approach social media and its use by employees. It’s essential that your employees understand the rules, ahead of time. Situations involving employees and social media will arise. If you don’t have social computing policies in place now, consider making this a priority.

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IT Employer brands on Social Media

Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by Gautam in Reports

I blogged about this report earlier, and so the time has come to share the full report with you.

To analyse the conversations and mentions of an Employment Brand on the social web we looked at them in these ways:

1. What are the work and HR related conversations that people are having? These would be linked to an employee’s personal work or a prospective employee’s perception of work in the organization.
2. What are people mentioning about the Organizational Culture?
3. What are people mentioning about the Leadership/Leader of a firm
4. What are the news items around deals, results that are being mentioned and referenced on the social web?

Some highlights:

Analysis of Conversations related to Human Resource issues

• TCS HR issues were mentioned the most followed by Infosys
• Negative mentions in this category were most for Infosys

Organizational Culture issues are a key component of discussions

• Culture gets defined externally by various organizational activities from CSR to Sports
• Such activities are mentioned in an overwhelming positive tone on the social web

TCS and Wipro led the conversations when it came to news - The nature of news determines the tone with news about salary increases being cheered by the online crowd.

The Social Employer Manifesto

Posted on 26. May, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

David Armano recently posted the Social Business manifesto focusing on the relationship between a social business and its customers.
So I thought I’d give a shot to making a manifesto for the Social Business and its relationship with employees.

1. We will no longer view you as “employees” only to do the work you are assigned. Instead, you are co-creators, participants, critics and advocates.
2. We will actively ask for your input on products, services, structures, processes and give it to you to co-create them with us.
3. We will focus not on the time you spend in office but the results you achieve.
4. We will provide value, not jobs.
5. We will provide you the tools to connect across silos, departments, locations to meet the changing demands of a networked economy and social customers.
6. We will focus on your needs vs. our ends.
7. We will together focus on reducing the noise within the organization.
8. We will together destroy processes that do not let us build human relationships within and without.
9. We will encourage you to build relationships that connect all of us with partners, stakeholders and customers in ways where we all benefit.

Analyzing Brands’ Mentions on the Social Web

Posted on 24. May, 2010 by Gautam in Reports

Often people wonder – sure there are people discussing our firm and brand on various social networking platforms like Twitter, Blogs and discussion forums, but how can we quantify it? How are we perceived overall? What are the themes people talk about? And is it mostly positive or negative?

So we at 2020 Social decided to do a little experiment.

We took a look at all the India based conversations on the social web which mentioned 5 Indian IT companies – Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and Patni Computers over a period of one month (March 2010) and then analysed them.

The findings were quite interesting.

We found that the themes that these conversations could be classified in the following areas: Relating to HR, Culture, Leadership and News items.

Most of these mentions (86%) were overwhelmingly in microblogs followed by discussion forums and then by blogs.

Most mentions were around news items, followed by Culture and HR

Take Aways from the report:

• There is a lot of discussion about IT firms related to work and HR related subjects .
• There is little or no engagement that the organizations are taking to connect with influencers and to drive the conversations

Skills For Social Media Evangelists

Posted on 23. Apr, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

What do you need to make your business “social”?

Caroline Dangsen puts down some characteristics she thinks the social media evangelist needs to shepherd the organization to become social:

• Passion for the business
• Appreciation for the organization’s cultural heritage
• Limitless determination and stamina
• Ability to influence
• Skills to maneuver the political landscape

These five characteristics are in addition to excellent interpersonal skills and a passion for social media.

Looking at these – it is worth noting that these are similar to Change Management skills – and I think Enterprise 2.0 and social media evangelists should look at the already considerable literature on driving organizational change – and take some pages out for it – and focus less on the tools and more on the cultural aspects. Caroline’s post is worth reading in this light

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The Emerging Role of the Community Manager

Posted on 05. Apr, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Trends

In my previous post, I stated that soon Recruiters and Hiring Manager would evolve from users of search engines and headhunters – to also adding their skill sets by becoming Talent Community Managers.

A valid question is – what does an Online Community Manager do? What are the skill sets, and what is the nature of this new emerging role? Do they really tweet and facebook all day long? A dream job for social networking addicts, perhaps?

Here’s an interesting post on the Responsibilities of Community Managers by Itamar Kestenbaum (@tweetamar) on the Techipedia blog.

Here’s what the key roles are according to him:

1. Make friends in the Industry
2. Look at boring stats and make them interesting
3. Have a little knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
4. Develop Relationships with Clients
5. Get Co-Workers Involved Online
6. Organize Logistics of Social Media generated Operations
7. Connect Good-Will for brand
8. Work with web developers to update your site to web2.0
9. Strategize with your webmaster to create a better conversion
10. Create and Execute Email Blasts

As more and more organizations move into managing online communities of customers, partners and employees – be prepared to see more and more roles being added to this list.

Building Talent Communities for Recruiting and Employment Branding

Posted on 04. Apr, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

HR and Organizational leaders face two big challenges in the context of two ever-changing realities – as the talent market booms and as job seekers turn from immediate peers to their connections and the collective wisdom of the social web. The two big challenges organizations face in this new reality are:

1. How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of their talent pool and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
2. Understand where the super talent prospective are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.

It is our belief that organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool – moving away from the existing debate about “passive candidates” or “active job-seekers”

When a person joins a talent community owned/ stewarded by an organization – he or she gives permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her – and it is up to the organization to either mess it up by “pushing” its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.

7 Social Roles for Employee Communities

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides

An employee community is a closed community within the firewall of the Organization 2.0 – where employees connect and build content along with each other to build relationships and knowledge.

At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. One of the key parts of the framework is the 7 types of social roles are lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.

Let’s try and put together an understanding on what these roles can be in employee communities:

1. The Lurker is a new employee or a late adopter who arrives at the employee community as someone who has heard good things about it – but is uncertain about what to do. Lurkers may be held back due to either being intensely private people or being technophobes. A lurker needs to be coached by the community manager and exposed to content that evokes a response from him.
2. A Learner is a person on the community who is interested – but often finds it over-whelming to navigate the conversatoins or to jump into conversations. Learners need to be directed to “how to start” documents and supported when they start making small but significant contributions.

Cultural Change in Organizations and Social Technologies

Posted on 24. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

As an Organizational Behavior person, I believe that Culture trumps strategy. And of course, can derail tactics and events that go against the grain of the culture within no time.

Today, I was talking to a CEO of a professional services firm who was sharing how he had tried to champion a micro-blogging tool within his firm to share information across locations and silos and how the fact they were a hierarchical organization probably killed the tool’s effectiveness.

Yes, technology, even when championed by the CEO can fail if it runs into culture.

Think of culture like the running river, and any initiative like a rock. The rock seems strong. With executive sponsorship, resources, and sometimes external consulting. Eventually the river wins. Not by strength but by persistence.

Social Media Workshops

Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Events, How To Guides

My colleague Gaurav Mishra is doing a workshop for NASSCOM Foundation on how non-profits can utilize social media. As he details in his blog – the workshop would have the following sessions :

10:00 – 11:00 Introduction to social media for non-profits
11:00 -11:30 Tea/ coffee break
11:30 – 12:30 Strategy, tactics, measurement
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch
1:30 – 2:30 Social media tools
2:30 – 3:00 Tea/ coffee break
3:00 – 4:00 Tying it together, using social media for raising awareness, fundraising and driving advocacy

In the workshop, I’ll build upon these simple three steps and help the attendees build a step-by-step guide to igniting and scaling the passion of their supporters in their chosen domain.

If you are a non-profits, register for the workshop or ask for more information at +91 11 40755722/23/24/32 or komal@nasscomfoundation.org.

What we realize is that even corporations are looking at workshops on how businesses can leverage social media. So here’s a draft workshop design that would focus on educating CXOs on how to leverage the social tools and technologies.

Take a look at our thoughts on Decoding Social