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.

Where do you start? First, visit IBM’s page on social computing policies. Social computing policies are not a “one size fits all” proposition, but reviewing IBM’s and other firms in your own industry is a great place to start. Then, go meet your legal team: show them the policies of other firms like yours and the best practices of firms like IBM’s and ask them to draft a set. Champion this effort and sell it in through HR.

Not only will you do yourself a lot of good – in the process, you will become the organization-wide go-to person for smart decisions involving social media – but you’ll also set in place a larger team of people within your organization that understands how social media can be responsibly brought into the business. That’s a huge win, and it sets you and your team up for further advances as you push from social media-based marketing to a more holistic social business.

With your policies in place, the next hurdle you’ll likely face is what to do about employee social media in places like Facebook, where individual pages or pages of their friends may or may not reflect the kinds of activities that you want your customers seeing. I’m not saying…I’m just saying, as the expression goes.

Read the full article. It’s well worth your time!

And also check this list of social media policies courtesy the Altimeter Group.

Cross posted on Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Building Talent Communities for Recruiting and Employment Branding
• Social Media Workshops
• How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit
• How to run an advocacy program on social web
• Leadership in the time of Social Media

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.

Insights

• 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
• Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
• We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
• These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

You can take a look at the report here:

Arun of Trak.in shared a very good round-up of the report on his blog. Go ahead and read his full analysis there.

Cross posted at Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0

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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.
10. We will act ethically and transparently, and expect you too, because it’s no longer a choice.

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.
10. We will act ethically and transparently, and expect you too, because it’s no longer a choice.

Any other point that you’d like to add to this manifesto? Leave a comment and let’s make this an ever growing list.

Cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• The making of a Social Organization
• Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies
• Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice
• Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business
• Employee’s Participation in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives

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
• Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
• We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
• These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

If you’d like to blog about the report, we can send it to you. Send me an email at gautam@2020social.com with “IT Brands Report” in the subject line

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit
• Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
• My NASSCOM Emerge Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010

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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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.

Until then – go ahead and read the full post.

If you are a Community Manager I would love to hear from you! Drop me an email

cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• What Are the Biggest Use Cases For Corporate Online Communities?

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.

As this becomes more and more common – recruiters and hiring managers will move more and more into “community manager” roles and need to build and take on newer skills to augment their existing skill sets. The ability that will count will not be to tell their own stories, but encouraging participants to tell their stories.

Here’s our suggested approach on how organizations can build their talent communities:

If you liked this post, you should also read:

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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.
3. The Connector is a person on the community who is a curator of information either through bookmarking or off-line knowledge gathering. They add great value to networks by answering individual’s questions with responses like “here’s where you can find this information…” or “here’s Vivek who has done stuff like this earlier, maybe you should ask him…” The connector uses people and document tags actively to curate content and point others to it.
4. The Moderator is usually a role given to the most passionate people in the community, and their roles can encompass guiding a new user to jump into discussions when they are getting into ad-hominem attacks to discontinuing or archiving inactive sections of the community. The moderator can have some subtle recognition systems in their control to make people into role models – to trigger more desired behaviors.
5. The Organizer is a critical role in the employee community – triggering occasions – both online as well as offline for the community members to connect with each other and discover common shared interests, lifestyles and passions.
6. The Teacher is the fulcrum of the community – the person who creates content and engages with the users/curators and commentators to create better content. Typically they are unafraid of putting their thoughts out in to open and having the community connect and comment around it. They’re mostly looking for the content to be improved by the community and create more.
7. The Super-User is someone who plays multiple roles in the community – and is typically mostly a Connector, Moderator, Organizer and Teacher who takes on the other roles.

If you’re interested in building employee communities – do you have people internally who would be natural fits and assume these roles? As we say, buying a software license for making basic to complicated employee communities using tools like SocialText (that we use internally), Cynapse, Yammer, SocialCast, Salesforce, Lotus Connections et al is the easy part – but being the lone warrior for “corporate social networking” is the surest way to failure

Cross Posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0

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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.

So this post by Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe) on the Enterprise Irregulars blog was quite interesting.

From 2004 on, people seized control of how they communicated 24/7. What devices they used, what tools they used, what channels they used, when they communicated, what they expected as a result of that communication, what kind of response they got, all shifted into the hands of the individual. In the world of business, communications about a company no longer needed some company venue to occur. For a communication or array of communications to affect a company, it didn’t have to occur with the company’s acquiescence. Even more telling, it could occur without the company’s knowledge. This meant that the company no longer controlled its own destiny in regard to its customers, though it, of course, continued to control its own operations. (the fact that the company still needs to run itself is one of the things at the core of the difference between Social CRM and almost anything else with the word “social” in it) The conversation passed into the hands of the customers – meaning they could damage, grow. or affect somewhere in between, a company without the company having much to say about it.

Culture can be grown – enabled – in the direction which employees want to take it.

The question is – will leaders’ give up the control?

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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

Workshop 1: Workshop for CXO’s


A. Social Media Basics (60 minutes)


1. What are Social Media and Social Technologies?

• Various forms and functionalities of Social technologies
• How ‘Social’ as a behavior is leveraged by these social technologies

2. Why is Social Media becoming so important?

• Impact of Social Media on people
• Impact of Social Media on society
• Impact of Social Media on Media
• Impact of Social Media on Businesses

B. Social Media for Business (60 Minutes)


1. Why do businesses need to become social?

• Connecting business needs to social business strategy solutions
• Social Media scope and benefits for B2C businesses
• Social Media scope and benefits for B2B businesses

2. How have other businesses become social?


Best Social Media practices and case studies
i. Business to Consumer businesses
ii. Business to Business businesses
iii. Enterprise collaboration


C. Social Media for CXOs (90 Minutes)


a. Why CXOs need to understand Social Media?


i. Underlying strategic dynamics CXOs need to know
ii. Linkage with business objectives


b. How can CXOs champion Social Media?


i. Governance implications
ii. Cross-department implications
iii. Cross-stakeholder implications


D. Social Media for [specific] businesses (90 Minutes)

• How can your business leverage social media?
  • Best practices and case studies
  • Opportunity for your company/business unit/group
• How can a B2C businesses leverage social media?
  • Best practices and case studies
  • Opportunity for specific business
• How can B2B businesses leverage social media?
  • Best practices and case studies
  • Opportunity for specific groups

Workshop 2: Workshop for Marketing, Brand, HR Managers


A. Understanding social media (60 Minutes)

• 1. What are Social Media and Social Technologies?
  • Various forms and functionalities of Social technologies
  • How ‘Social’ as a behavior is leveraged by these social technologies
• 2. Why is Social Media becoming so important?
  • Impact of Social Media on people
  • Impact of Social Media on society
  • Impact of Social Media on Media
  • Impact of Social Media on Businesses

B. Understanding social media for businesses (90 Minutes)

• Establishing a presence on social web

• • Social Media channels
  • Why should the brand participate?

• Scope and benefits of Social Media

• • Business objectives that can be achieved
  • Best practices and case studies for B2C businesses
  • Best practices and case studies for B2B businesses
  • Best practices and case studies of internal collaboration and employee community

Scope for Specific Business

• Best practices in businesses related to organization/ group
• Role for marketing managers
• Role for HR managers

C. Social Media for marketing (90 Minutes)

• How should a brand market itself on social web:
• Understanding consumer behavior; the 5 Cs of social media

• • Consumer Generated content
  • Conversations
  • Collaboration
  • Community
  • Collective intelligence

• Choosing the right behavior and the right channel

2. Social Media monitoring


D. Leveraging social media in your business (60 Minutes)

• Building a social media plan for Business
• Building Communities (of Employees, Customers, Partners)

Do share your thoughts on what else do you think a workshop like this should contain…

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• Building Talent Communities for Recruiting and Employment Branding
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• Three Scenarios: How Can Indian Firms Leverage Social Technologies Within the Workplace?
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• Social Media in India: Airtel Review