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

LiveMint recently did a story on my NASSCOM Foundation workshop on social media for non-profits.

Here is the video interview –

Here is the full text of the LiveMint story –

Why and how nonprofits should use social media
Gaurav Mishra, CEO of 2020 Social, talks about how Indian nonprofits can best use social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to further their causes

It’s hard being a nonprofit these days. In an increasingly competitive world populated by increasingly busy people who are increasingly careful about how they spend their money in a post-recession era, nonprofits are struggling more than ever to raise awareness, attract volunteers, and generate a long-term interest in the causes they work for.

Strapped for time, money and manpower, more and more nonprofits are turning to sites like Facebook and Twitter, hoping to leverage these free platforms to generate mass interest at minor costs. However the social media space, like the real world, is crowded, noisy and extremely competitive, and many nonprofits after setting up that Facebook fan page or Twitter account are at a loss as to what to do next.

On Tuesday, participants at a workshop on social media for nonprofits, organized by the Nasscom Foundation and held by Gaurav Mishra, CEO of Mumbai based social media research and strategy company 2020 Social, voiced some of their doubts.

“What if I run a contest on my website and nobody participates?” asked one lady who works for an international nonprofit that uses media and communications to achieve development goals. “How do I know if our fans on Facebook are actually engaged, or whether they’re just there for the heck of it?” asked another participant who works for an international artist’s association.

In an interview with Mint, Gaurav Mishra puts things in perspective, bluntly pointing out that social media is no panacea for a struggling nonprofit’s communications problems. He underscores that the very first step for a nonprofit is to identify the cause it is working towards, and consequently who its evangelists are. Social media can then be used to organize and energize this base of people.

“Nonprofits must start outside in and not inside out,” he says. “Always start by thinking about who are the people whose lives you’re trying to change, what is the big cause you’ve committed yourself to. Start from there and then come down to the specifics.”

He points to Pratham Books as an instance of an Indian nonprofit that has made excellent use of social media by soliciting feedback, sharing content, engaging its existing community, recruiting new volunteers and building interest through tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog For Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Activists.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• My NASSCOM Foundation Workshop on Social Media for Non-Profits
• LiveMint Story on How Indian Airlines Are Using Social Media
• My Upcoming NASSCOM Foundation Workshop For Non-Profits: How To Scale Passion
• LiveMint Article on Indian Brands Using Social Media
• Singapore Management University Social Media in Asia Wiki

Here is the 175+ slide deck from my NASSCOM Foundation workshop on social media for non-profits.

I built upon the themes from my NASSCOM Emerge workshop on social media for B2B marketers and argued that “social media strategy” isn’t really about “social media tools”, but about answering three questions –

- Who are our evangelists and why will they talk about us? Or, how to identify passion?
- How can we organize and energize our evangelists? Or, how to ignite passion?
- How can we help our evangelists spread the word? Or, how to scale passion?

I also argued that this outside-in cause-first approach should be natural to non-profits, except that non-profits often forget that they are in the business of changing people’s lives, not running a more popular program, with more funding and more staff. I pointed out the irony that I often tell marketers and entrepreneurs to behave more like activists, but also have to remind non-profits to behave more like activists themselves.

Finally, I used the example of Pratham Books to showcase how a non-profit can benefit from the full range of possibilities social media opens up for them. The Pratham Books case study is a good example of this outside in approach because Pratham is using tools like blog, Scribd, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to build a community around books and reading, not the organization itself.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog For Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Activists.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• LiveMint Story on My NASSCOM Foundation Workshop on Social Media for Non-Profits
• My Upcoming NASSCOM Foundation Workshop For Non-Profits: How To Scale Passion
• My NASSCOM Emerge Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers
• My Upcoming Full Day NASSCOM Workshop For B2B Marketers
• Three Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Activists

Here is the mammoth 225+ slide deck from my NASSCOM Emerge full day Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers.

I started off by being provocative and arguing that “social media strategy” isn’t really about “social media”, but about answering three questions –

- Who are our evangelists and why will they talk about us? Or, how to identify passion?
- How can we organize and energize our evangelists? Or, how to ignite passion?
- How can we help our evangelists spread the word? Or, how to scale passion?

I have riffed on the same idea during my GoaFest 2010 talk on how marketing is changing. The NASSCOM Emerge workshop helped me sharpen it and resulted in the post: Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps.

The deck itself is a little rough around the edges, but I’ll tighten it up and replace the present version, so do feel free to embed and share it –

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog For Marketers, Entrepreneurs and Activists.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• My Upcoming Full Day NASSCOM Workshop For B2B Marketers
• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Campaign India Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• afaqs Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010

Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps:

1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay.

2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win at social is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on energizing your evangelists.

3. So, start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talkworthy touchpoints.

4. Then, ask: How can we create a compelling social object (that is unique to us) that will inspire our evangelists to talk about us? Usually, your organization, brand or advertising campaign aren’t good social objects, but a lifestyle, interest or cause are.

5. Then, ask: How can we organize our evangelists around our chosen social object using one of the 5Cs of social: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence?

6. Only then, use social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to help your evangelists share their passion. Each social network appeals to a different type of users for a different purpose. Each social network has a different soul and, therefore, a different role. So, the content and conversations for each social network should be customized for its users the specific purpose for which they use the social network.

7. The real value lies in asking and answering the questions in steps 3-4-5. Step 6, without steps 3-4-5, will end up looking like spam. Step 7, then, is to remind yourself that you don’t want to be in the spam business.

So, that was everything you needed to know about social media marketing in seven short steps.

If seven steps were too much for you, here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in three simpler (and shorter) steps –

- Step 1: Identify Passion — Select a BIG lifestyle, interest, or cause.
- Step 2: Ignite Passion — Build a focused community around it.
- Step 3: Scale Passion — Build scale by leveraging existing social platforms.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• My NASSCOM Emerge Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Campaign India Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• afaqs Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Writing on the Wall: Every Single Talk at GoaFest 2010 Was About Social Media

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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Earlier today, Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch leaked published an internal memo from new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal in which he announced his decision to phase out Ning’s free “build your own social network” service to focus on premium networks and lay off more than a third of its staff.

The announcement has triggered a number of reactions, around three predominant themes –

1. Et Tu Ning!: By phasing out its free service Ning is betraying its Network Creators who have bought into its promise of “build your own social network for free” and invested time and effort to build their niche communities. Even though some Network Creators could pay for premium accounts, most would move out of Ning, to other free or premium options like Buddypress, Kickapps or even Posterous.

My take: Ning’s about turn does feel like a betrayal and even network creators like myself who are already paying for premium services will like Ning less for it. However, I expect Ning to offer an entry level premium option in the $10 to $20 a month range, and I expect most networks with more than a few hundred members to stay on with Ning, partly because there’s no easy option to transition the networks to another service.

2. Ning is dead already: Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini’s departure last month and its abrupt announcement today are a sign of a serious crisis at the company. Equally worrisome is co-founder and chairman Marc Andreesen’s vote of confidence in Ning as recently as last month. It seems that Ning has realized that it’s competing with Facebook Pages and thrown in the towel. It also seems that Ning is headed for the deadpool, only a year after it was valued at $750 million.

My take: It’s too early to write Ning’s obituary. It may yet reinvent itself as a premium white label social networking platform and compete with the likes of KickApps. Expect Ning to announce a range of premium services soon, including an option to not use the Ning ID at all.

3. Freemium is dead: Ning’s announcement to abandon its free networks is the beginning of the end for not only Ning, but also the freemium model itself, where a small number of paid premium accounts cross-subsidize a large number of free accounts. It’s time to accept that the web 2.0 business model of offering a free service to build a huge user base before trying to monetize it through advertising or upgrades was a myth to begin with. If Facebook and Twitter die along with Ning, we can all go back to business.

My take: Ning may or may not be dead, but the freemium model will continue to be relevant. It’s becoming evident that different types of freemium models — some based on features, others based on the number of users, and still others based on quantity of usage — might work in different contexts. It seems that the trick is to get users used to paying a little early on and provide a clear upgrade path from thereon.

I’m a little surprised that nobody is talking about what will happen to the idea of customized niche networks itself. I believe that customized niche networks are here to stay. While Facebook Pages will become the default first choice for organizations to create an online community, we will see more standalone communities, not fewer.

During my talk at GoaFest 2010, I argued that the big question in marketing in the 21st century isn’t “how do we get the attention of the biggest audience?” but “how do we scale passion?” and suggested that scaling passion is similar to spreading an epidemic.

- First, you create or identify a potent virus (an ideavirus, or a social object, a lifestyle, interest or cause).

- Then, you bring together a small group of susceptible people into a small space and infect them with the virus (similar to building a focused online community).

- Finally, you let these people out into the world so that they can infect others (similar to connecting your community to existing social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube).

Ning may or may not be dead, but niche communities are far from dead. It’s not a coincidence that the white label community vendor market is as competitive as any other.

Here are some other insightful posts you should look at: David Heinemeier Hansson at 37 Signals, Mathew Ingram at GigaOm, Shel Holtz, Emory Kale, Patricio Robles, Kirsten Winkler, Nick O’ Neill, Andrew Watson.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog: The Intersection of Culture, Technology and Marketing.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Campaign India Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• afaqs Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Writing on the Wall: Every Single Talk at GoaFest 2010 Was About Social Media