Decoding Social: How Are Social Technologies Changing Business, Media and Society?

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Announcements, Ideas, Media

At 2020 Social, we understand that the nature of knowledge is changing from stock to flow and knowledge will become redundant in the blink of an eye, if not shared with others. On the other hand, if we share knowledge with other, often for free, they repay us with attention, and we create more opportunities for ourselves to learn and share more.

In this spirit, we will be sharing all our research, point of view, conference and workshop decks with the community of social media practitioners and enthusiasts we have learned so much from.

We speak at almost a dozen events every month, and sometimes use the same ideas across talks. For instance, I have given several related talks on “how to scale passion?” or “what can entrepreneurs learn from activists?” at BITS Pilani, IIT Roorkee, TEDIndia, Startup Saturday Delhi, Social Media Club Mumbai, IIT Delhi and Pecha Kucha Bangalore. Each talk is a work-in-progress artifact and I have seen these ideas evolve, each time I talk about them. While individual slide decks for each talk are interesting as artifacts, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to share a master slide deck (that’s in constant beta) so that people can easily refer to the latest iteration of our thinking.

With that background, let me share the latest version of our 100+ slide workshop deck titled “Decoding Social: How Are Social Technologies Changing Business, Media and Society?”

I used a version of this deck earlier today as the first of my three guest lectures at Mudra Institute of Commuications, Ahmedabad on how social technologies are changing business. I intend to use this deck next in the introductory session of my NASSCOM Foundation workshop on “how to scale passion”.

Here are the three key mantras the deck builds upon –

- The future has already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

- The tools are transient; the values embedded in them are persistent.

- To understand how social technologies are changing media and business, begin by asking how they are changing people and society.

Here are the five key questions the deck seeks to answer –

- What are social technologies and why are they important?

- How are social technologies changing people?

- How are social technologies changing society?

- How are social technologies changing media?

- How are social technologies changing business?

If you want one of the 2020 Social experts (Gaurav, Dave, Gautam, Kaushal) to speak at your event, write to us at contact@2020social.com.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

Social Media Stories Last Week

Posted on 24. Feb, 2010 by Hardeep Kaur Rai in Media, Reviews, Trends

Social Media News Stories This Past Week

So another week passes by and we bring to you a wrap-up of all the interesting tit-bits fron the Indian social media space.

1)    Business Line featued an article by Anjali Prayag and Swetha Kannan on how corporates understand that ‘Social Networking is a serious business’ on 14th Feb. The article states how companies such as IBM and EMC are ‘using employees urge to keep in touch with people to their advantage by also creating their own networking tools, which they believe are useful to businesses’. The article further mentions IBM’s LotusConnections and EMC’s EMC One as social collaboration tools which carry features similar to social networking sites such as blogs,  groups, user profiles, wikis, file sharing, photos and forum capabilities that enhance project collaboration for employees.

Comment- While the above trend is increasingly being incorporated amongst corporates, it is still in an exploratory mode in India. Quite a number of Indian firms are still apprehensive and struggling with the concept of social media and perceive social networking as a ‘waste activity’ that slows down the productivity factor of employees.  What they fail to understand is that social networking can actually transcend into a tool for honest communication between employees and the firm as well as the employees themselves. Iit is precisely this open communication which sets the foundation for a globally forward firm that will ultimately realize its vision.

2)     Times of India chronicled the trend of youngsters from towns and cities across using  internet  and mobile phone to profess love this Valentine’s day. The article ‘Enter Cupid: Love Blooms in Towns & Tehsils’ by Insiya Amir featured on 14th Feb states, ‘New media such as mobile phone and internet is a godsend for young couples in several parts of middle India where public displays of affection are frowned upon’.

Comment- Even though in different contest, yet here we see social media doing what it does best i.e connecting people across boundaries albeit  here they are societal rather than geographical. Another reason why social networking is massively popular amongst youngsters.

3)    In a somewhat similar tone to the above article, Economic Times featured an article ‘Tapping into Love @ work’ by Ishani Duttagupta on 14th Feb. The article looks at the role of social networking and social commerce in connecting to  the younger audience and their needs. The article states, ‘There’s a huge surge in online buying, gifting  and internet searches around festivals and  events such as Valentine’s Day. For small mom and pop kind of businesses, it makes a lot of sense to advertise around social networking space- even bigger brands are now looking into the space to tap into the youth market in India. In the case of events such as Valentine’s Day which most youth would like to play out in the physical space, the online media is typically an awareness major, an interest aggregator and desire generator’.

Comment- Social media has changed the very dynamics of communications and the consequent marketing and advertising strategies. The fact that most of the younger audience is almost always connected online in some form or the other is changing the way relationships are conducted. Today it does not matter whether your sweetheart is in another city or country. The internet makes it possible to celebrate special occasions, video chat  and voice chat. And it is precisely this youth connect that marketers and communicators are looking to utilize.

4)    Following last week’s footsteps, this week saw another mention of Buzz. This time around Economic Times featured an article ‘Google fixing bugs to make the Buzz beep louder’ by Debjoy Sengupta and Harsimran Singh. As the title suggests, the article touches upon the flaws of Buzz that Google is working hard to fix. Buzz users have been complaining about flaws such as privacy concerns including auto-follow, Geo-location and Buzz spam thus leading to some amount of backlash.

Comment- Google is eager to see Buzz become popular enough. Its favourable point is that its entwined with Gmail- the email product of Google. What remains to be seen is how Google will play Buzz strategically to gain market share in the social networking space.

5)    Financial Chronicle featured an article ‘Small Blessing’ by Ipshita Kumar on 16th Feb reporting the blessing social media has proved to be for small restaurants. The author states, ‘Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have definitely been a blessing for small businesses like small independent restaurants to even compete with big chain restaurants. The main advantage of a networking site’s ad to the restaurant is targeted advertising’.

Comment- Social networking allows businesses to build a strong presence across target audience. The advantage of social media is that anybody with a small marketing budget can utilize the social networking sites to reach out to customers within one’s vicinity.  

 

6)    DNA featured an article chronicling the user experience of Venkatesan Vembu of a new online service ChatRoulette started by a 17 year old boy from Moscow in its 17th Feb edition. In the article ‘We are all strangers in a strange world’, Mr. Vembu states, ‘On the website, visitors use a webcam to chat with a succession of perfect strangers from anywhere in the world, pulled out randomly from among the thousands online at any given time. Since there’s no registration or filtering involved and you don’t get to choose whom you’ll get to chat with, it makes for a surreal social encounter for both parties. For all its utter pointlessness, ChatRoulette has an oddly mesmeric quality to it partly arising from the oddball nature of the characters you encounter, even if only fleetingly ’.

Comment- The world is already fitting into the palm of your hand and considering the social media space, social interactions are evolving with every passing minute and more so defined by youth culture. The popularity of the above online service ChatRoulette brings to light a new genre of social interactions.

7)    DNA featured the case of an online identity theft instance of notable Bollywood director Madhur Bhandarkar in its article ‘Who’s the imposter on Madhur’s social networking site?’ on 18th Feb. The article reveals ‘The person who is using Madhur’s photo as the profile picture, has written several things including hailing Shah Rukh Khan and his recently released movie’.

Comment- Such instances are increasingly becoming common place along with online death hoaxes. Truly , a scary thing considering the  huge fan following and the trouble and confusion it could create for the ‘real person’ and the people following him/her.

8)    Time for a film on social networking sites like Facebook? Well so thinks director Roshan Abbas.  DNA reports in its article ‘Facebook..time for a film about it’on how the debutant director is making a film on how youth today connect through social networking sites. All of Roshan Abbas’s friends on Facebook get regular updates about his film Always Kabhi Kabhi and also provide regular inputs to him via the same.   

Comment- It was inevitable. The youth of today spend most of their time online and any director who wants to capture the true mindset of youth has to bring in his/her’s social networking profiles on these sites into the picture. Case in point being the latest youth oriented Bollywood film Love Aaj Kal where the young protagonists are presented to explore each other’s  social networking profiles to know more about each other’s personalities.

9)    The Financial Express featured an article ‘Facebook offers more payment options for items in games’ on 20th Feb that elaborated on Facebook Inc’s new service Facebook Credits that gives it 30% cut off from sales of items sold in virtual games on Facebook.  The article reports, ‘ The company will make the service available on many more games ahead of its annual developer conference this April’.

Comment- It is a superb tactic by Facebook to earn some revenue considering its popularity as a social networking site as well as gaming platform. Presently gamers pay for virtual items to Zynga Inc and Electronic Arts  Inc. Advertisers will also be able to purchase ads on Facebook through Paypal, a unit of E-Bay Inc.

10)    Times of India published an article ‘New Media has disrupted marketing’ elaborating on the recently held CII Brand Summit 2010 in its 20th Feb issue. The article elaborates on how marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to grab attention of consumers and new media can actually help with better connect with consumers who are spending a lot of time and having conversations on social media. The article quotes Dave Evans, Consulting Director at 2020Social, ‘Brands need to become part of social networks, become part of the conversations’.

Comment- Most of today’s youth spend their time on platforms like internet, mobile devices and are increasingly choosing to hold all interactions on the online platform. This makes it an imperative medium to understand and utilize for every marketer.

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.

It is our belief at 2020 Social that social technologies can provide each employee with their learning content that suits their overall approach and help in better retention of learning. Hence the proposed solution will have elements that cater to all the above.

Part 1: Consists of static content that would help people to discover the “must know” aspects of what is to be learned

Basic Content focused on the Subject Matter that every new Executive/Manager would go through when they join the organization. It would cover the following

  1. Basics of the subject expertise – Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge
  2. Additional Reading Material – Documents that people can download
  3. List of Resources – Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at one point.
  4. List of People (yellow pages) – employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to contact them (email, Skype, IM)
  5. FAQs – A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know
  6. Best Practices – e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above can be edited by certain key people. Other employees can add comments below the content.
Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey tool – acting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt

Part 2: Dynamic Learning

What’s new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firm’s products/services/ operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence

This would consist of a stream of constantly dynamic news and market/competitor intelligence that would get updated on an employee’s dashboard that he/she can click through and view the detailed content if he/she wants.Personalised Dashboard for each Employee which can be customized to follow information and news relevant for his/her own needs

  1. RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market name.
  2. RSS feeds of thought leaders’ blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the employee’s desktop
  3. Twitter updates of the who’s who of subject matter so that employees can track and even interact with them. Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/
  4. Competitive Intelligence – A dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific regions.
  5. New videos and Slideshows – Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like “Financial marketing” or “Consumer Behavior” or “HR Trends”) would be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

Part 3: Collaboration

Enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with each other.

This part would focus on how employees can use social software to connect with each other and work together to create strategies, tactics, execution. This would consist of the following parts:

  1. Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, product on initiatives
  2. Status updates – would let other people know what the employee is working on so that if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.
  3. Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and what worked and best practices learnt from them
  4. Sharing project plans for campaigns and getting peers’ feedback on them.
  5. Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants – which are archived – and after some time some which are basic can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part.
  6. Discussion around events like conferences, trainings that some employees go to – can share learnings, videos, slides with the rest of the peer group – resulting in richer and more learning

(Cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

How to leverage Social Technologies to Build Online Talent Communities

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Some thoughts I put together – on how the Recruiting function can leverage Online Talent Communities to build a pipeline for future workforce.

I know there are no great examples of “real” Talent Communities – and that is why I think the first organization that gets it right would benefit the most!

Thoughts? Send me an email ! View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh

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.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.

The Five Underlying Dynamics of Social Technologies

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.

Finding Experts within Organizations using Social Technologies

Posted on 07. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

‘Interesting article in the WSJ how social technologies can help tap into and be aware of an organization’’s expertise systems.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

While I agree with the premise – let us agree that social tools won”t just enable adoption – specially if the organization has treated external social networking with a different standard (i.e. by banning access and firewalling them :-)

My view is that adoption of tools will also be slow in organizations where automation is being viewed as something to be suspicious of, or if it entails duplication of work and effort.

The other aspect is – not all experts would like to write about their expertise or they might not have the skills needed to cultivate readership or networks.(cross posted from Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

On Joining 2020 Social

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Gautam in Announcements

‘Today I joined 20:20 Social, India’s first social business strategy consulting firm\n\nMost people I told this asked me what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders – that’s right folks, bringing the social web into the organization. As I have believed – such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice – or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career – when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Managementand then e-learning.

However as much as I love tools – I know that culture always trumps tactics, tools and even strategy. So I am looking at leveraging my HR and OD learnings to help client organizations deploy these social tools. Additionally, I am super-excited to be working along with the amazing 2020 social team that includes an old blogging acquaintanceGaurav Mishra who blogs at gauravonomics.com. What makes Gaurav a kindred spirit is his openness and transparency as CEO – he blogs about the organization as he manages itCheck out Gaurav’s posts onhow to build an Open and Collaborative Professional Services Firm, andTop 10 FAQs on Building a Social Business Strategy Firm in India. Am also looking forward to working with a true blue Thought Leader Dave Evans (not the AC/DC guyauthor of a book on Social Media Marketing who blogs at http://readthis.com

Who are the other folks who are doing something similar?

Well there are two that I know of – the Altimeter Group and Dachis Group.

2020 Social has just started its journey and I am very excited to be part of something so new and emergent.

(cross posted from my other blog)

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