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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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.

Listening: A Key to Social Media Strategy

Posted on 25. Mar, 2010 by Mohit in How To Guides

Listening Provides Actionable Insight

With the rise of self-publishing on the internet, the Brand monologue (PR, Advertisement, Below the line activities) has become more of a multilogue: a many-to-many conversation. Your customers, investors, supporters, and detractors talk amongst themselves and share their views on you to anyone who is interested. They share their voice in different formats and on different platforms. The question is: Are you listening? Are you listening to their views/ opinions/ suggestions? Are you responding?

For all brands that want to leverage Social Media to reach out to its consumers and build relationships, listening (Social Media Monitoring) is the first step. Some important objectives brand can achieve from listening are:-

1. Tracking Brand Mentions: This certainly improves the self-awareness to track volume of information, but it’s like normal PR “clip tracking service” which ends at number of mentions and share of voice. 

2. Measuring Success of a Marketing Campaign: Listening during different phase of campaign (pre, during and post) can provide the marketers some useful insight to define and manage campaign more accurately. It can also help in identifying the success and failure of different elements during the campaign and to make course corrections nearly real-time.

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

Using Social Tools and Staffing/Recruiting

Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides, Ideas, Trends

A friend asked me some questions on doing Recruiting through Social Media. Here’s what I answered:

1. What is the web2.0 (pl explain in the simplest terms!) and which of these can be used by the Staffing team of the company?

Web2.0 is the collective name for a lot of technologies by which people can interact with other people (and organizations) on the web, publicly and in a transparent manner. It can include forums, blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, orkut etc.

We believe that Social technologies help people connect around some Core Dynamics – Content Generation, Conversations, Collaborating together, Community Formation and Collective Intelligence. Different functionalities enable users to connect differently

2. How widespread is the use of the web2.0 for finding top talent ? (can you give examples of companies who are doing this?) For instance, are there companies who are using Twitter to keep in touch with the campus crowd?)

The first question the recruiter needs to answer is – who is my top talent and what is he/she interested in? Primarily there are interested in the content and knowledge component of the job. Followed by organizational culture and the mechanics of the job. The recruiting firm needs to reach out to the community where top talent is likely to be present and present the above – by way of blog posts, youtube videos, pictures and discussion forums.

Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities

Posted on 13. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

At 2020 Social we’ve been thinking hard about the various ways in which organizations can leverage different kinds of social tools and technologies to connect and build conversations.

One of the ways we’ve started to articulate it over the last few weeks is focusing on use cases.

So thinking about what organizations could do to build talent communities and employee communities we came up with this presentation

Today, I try and extend this framework to look at the various ways organizations and people communicate.

So if you look at the diagram above , communication can be from few to many, few to few, many to few and between many to many.

So the implications for Talent and Employee Communities are quite different

Take a look at the use cases given below

These can also be represented in the Employee Life Cycle – where an Alumni community also comes to the fore

What examples do you have to share on how your organization has utilized social technologies for cultivating Talent and Employee Communities?

Cross posted on my other blog Gautam on Organizations 2.0

Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb’s Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist – Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What’s new? I’m game for anything. Training approach – Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector – Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I’d like time to think about this. Training approach – Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist – Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach – Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist – Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach – Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

Employee’s Participation in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

I can see whatever the issues that were there during Knowledge Management also getting repeated when it comes to sharing and collaboration in the Hyper-Linked Organization aka Enterprise 2.0

During the turn of the century – when KM – and the dream to let employees share what they know – was directed , the KM advocates (like me!) suggested that knowledge sharing should be given rewards. The thought was that if a person does not see a benefit for himself why would he share his knowledge with the behavior.

I have changed my belief – in part due to analysing my own behaviour on the social web.

Behaviours like sharing and collaboration are Organizational Citizenship Behaviors – and are a product of Employee’s Engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay.

Highly engaged employees who would indulge in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors follows the Power Law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.