Photos from the Indian Marketing Summit

I had earlier posted on my presentation on Social Media for Small And Medium Businesses that I made at the Indian Marketing Summit on 23rd January.

Here are some pics from the Summit.

If you'd like me or someone else from 2020 Social to come and address your firm/conference on how building Online Communities (of customers, partners, employees) can help your business, just email me.

Changing the Business Game

Nilofer Merchant asks: Can we Change the Game of Business? She suggests we all need to change to change the way business is conducted.

She suggests:

1. Stop wanting praise.
2. Stop focusing on Titles, Shmitles.
3. Remember, be good humans.
4. Shooting the conflict avoiders.
5. Discussing/Owning Failure.
6. Killing Power-games.

As much as I agree and identify with Nilofer in her mission to change business into collaborative and open discussions, there are other things that need to change apart from just people and their behavior. People are the most difficult to change - if they don't see how they and the larger organization are going to benefit from the change.

Organizational culture - the evanescent thing that shapes our behavior is driven not just by people's behaviors - but is shaped by non-human things like Organizational Structure, Processes (like reward and growth processes), Information processes and Access systems. Even external benchmarks like the structure of the industry, customer expectations impact how people behave in organizations.

So Nilofer's post is a starting point - but the real key to sustaining the change is changing the systems, structures and processes that mould people's behaviors.

What do you think?

Small Businesses, Social Media and the Internet

I got quoted in the SME Times article on how social media can help small businesses. Building social platforms around a social object (lifestyle, cause or passion) might not be scalable for all SMEs - this step can be done by a third party - a facebook for SMEs somebody - to connect not around the products but around users.

Here's part of the article:

Another prominent speaker on the occassion, Gautam Ghosh, Consultant of 2020 Social Media, said, "Internet can act as a leverager for users who are already using the Internet. If a person is not on the Internet it really can't help much."

When asked how IT enabled tools can help MSEs, Ghosh told SME Times: "For them (MSEs) other things can be done. If somebody takes the initiative to give them a platform, a MSE can say: 'this is what I do' or 'this is the product' and so these kind of platforms (B2B) can help them to reach globally."

"I must say if a MSE has no idea about IT, it should take advantages of B2B websites like tradeindia.com, which has a social media presence too. So one can join a B2B website where one can get trade leads," Ghosh added.

Connectedness and Transparency

Building open organizations that embrace radical transparency is not easy. It is resisted by the powers that are.

Whenever people want to open up anything that was guarded and secret - there are always people who are threatened.

These can be the Supreme Court in India (which is saying that the Right to Information does not apply to it) or the big-wig editors in the Media (who question the right of bloggers to question them).

However, there have been organizations even before the age of social media who have implemented radically transparent systems like shown in the book Maverick by Ricardo Semler.

So here's a Harvard article that puts together example of research that the uber-connected organization actually benefits more.

Recent research provides evidence that there are business benefits to becoming an über-connected organization:

• Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dr Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at University of Melbourne in Australia, workers who engage in "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" are more productive than those who don't. "People who surf the Internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," he says. "Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that's not always the case."
  
• Millennials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media. Those born between 1977 and 1997 — the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers — are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity. An Accenture survey of Millennial preferences for various technologies at work found that they prefer to communicate via instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook and RSS feeds. What's more, they are prepared to bypass corporate IT departments if these tools are blocked. One Millennial MBA, typical of those we meet, says, "I need to access my Facebook in order to do my job." Has blocking Facebook today become the equivalent of denying an employee access to a phone at work 40 years ago or email 20 years ago?
  
• Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce. Take the case of Cerner Corporation, the health IT firm. In 2009, Cerner implemented uCern, a corporate social network. In 2010, it will extend this social network to its customers and suppliers. Why? Because uCern has demonstrated significant business benefits to Cerner such as allowing employees to have increased access to experts across the globe, reducing the cycle time from discovery of new products to launch of new products, and increasing employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace.
  

As we scan the workplace of the future, we see that everything we know about work — where we work, how we work, what skills we need to stay employable, what technologies we use to connect with colleagues — is changing. And these changes will only continue to accelerate as we move toward 2020, as the Millennial Generation will comprise nearly half of the workforce by 2014.

Managing People - The toughest job?

Is managing people the toughest job in the world?

Some people might disagree - saying things like managing finances is tough. Or managing disasters is tougher. Or something else.

Here are my reasons why I think managing people is tough (if not the toughest job in the world!)

1. People (you bosses and your subordinates!) expect you to be a mindreader and understand what they want
2. Whenever you take a decision for your team there are sure to be at least some people who are unhappy about it
3. When people have to give good news they'll do that directly - but when it's bad news its you who have to deliver that.
4. You never know when you are right. Decisions are taken and whether they are right or wrong is only in hindsight.

What do you think? What's the toughest job in the world, according to you?

If you agree what are the other reasons you'd add to the list :) ?

How can Small Medium Businesses utilize Social Media

I was at the 4th Indian Marketing Summit today on a panel discussion with luminaries like Mahendra Swarup who founded Indiatimes.com, Bikky Khosla of Tradeindia.com, Prof. Govind Hariharan from the Michael J Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University and Rajeev Karwal, Founder and CEO of Milagrow.

The presentation I made is here:

How can Small and Medium Business Enterprises Leverage Social Media and the power of Online Communities - Thoughts by 2020 Social

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

The other panelists chose to speak rather than present, so I can't share the presentations here :)

There was a lively Q&A session where some students asked me interesting questions on cloud computing, ranking users on Twitter and how Social Media could help small enterprises recruit employees.

Overall a great learning experience for me!

Is Online Influence really influence?

Yesterday I found out that a firm called Traackr had compiled a list of 25 top HR influencers globally and I was one of them (gasp!)

I nearly spilled my morning coffee on my netbook when I read it.

So I checked Traackr's website and found that they compile influencers list for various domains to enable PR and Marketing people to connect with them.

Their website states:

We sort through the massive amount of data on social media to identify the most influential individuals in their community around specific issues, markets, brands.
Traackr calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.

When I asked them on Twitter about their algorithm here's what they replied: it's a multi keyword search that searches 20+ social networks, measures reach, resonance (how far stories spread), & relevance


But is online influence really influence?

My organizational professor defined Power as the ability to make others behave in a way you would want them to behave. Willingly. Whereas, influence is not really about Power - it refers to changing perceptions of people. It is linked to one of the sources of Power - expertise power. Online influence is actually a function virtual reputation. Which is why even if one is the top HR influencer in the world - it doesn't translate into people doing out of turn favors for you :)

In other news I begged the Recruiting Animal to make me the HR King of India in his annual awards for 2009 ;-) Yeah, emotional manipulation is a way to influence people too :)

Oh by the way, did you check out the latest Carnival of HR at Lisa's blog? No?

Then what are you doing here... go check it out

Is a personal brand really "personal" on Social Media?

The genesis of this blog post was also a tweet reply asking "how do regular social media 'veterans' working in a digital firm reconcile their personal and employee entities?"

I responded that whichever social media outpost I frequent be it Facebook, Twitter or my Ning community - I essentially keep it related to work and the things that interest me - people within the context of organizations, and emergent ways of working, managing and leading.

Then I thought about it - most people I know who are "personal brands" on social media are really "professional brands" with elements of their personal life that are woven into it. It's just that the degree of sharing differs - someone like Scoble does it to one extent and Penelope Trunk to a different extent.


However the picture muddies when a person has built up a brand - and it clashes with his/her employee responsibilities. Some employers benefit from the presence such people bring. Specially PR firms which have hired social media rockstars like Steve Rubel, David Armano. And yet for other kinds of employers having an employee speak out is not easy - so that's why we've seen HR bloggers like Lance Haun go through anonymity to openness. Whereas there are still others like Evil HR Lady who choose to be anonymous.

My hypothesis is that there is no real "personal" brand in the sense of talking only about "personal details" - except a few - but what is called a "personal brand" is actually an "Individual's brand" and which is about a passion/interest area he/she has.

This is critical.

The "building of the individual's brand" should not be the objective alone. If that is the objective, social media is not the solution.

Think of it in this way:
Unless you like gardening you won't have the patience to grow a tree over 3-4 years and then get its fruit.

Recruit for a Cause Not a Role

This conversation unfolded over Twitter, where I tweeted that most commonly people got disengaged between the time of getting their offer letter and actually joining. And that is because they are most "orphaned" then. Some HR people recognise this - but the vast majority don't.

Then Kirti tweeted back, what about the people who get an offer and then "shop around"? How does one deal with them?

My first response was to reply that if HR kept them engaged in this crucial time - maybe they wouldn't have gone shopping.

My second thought was - If people are shopping maybe the firm is not paying the market rate

My third response was - thank goodness you were spared a mercenary.

That got me thinking.. most people are not mercenaries - and yet during the recruiting time most turn into one. Why does that happen?

There are various reasons... but here's my hypothesis:

1. Most HR people are too busy trying to match skills and competencies - that they fail to connect the purpose of a role and the candidate's desire to be meaningful

If you work in organizations I can picture you shaking your head and saying:

"Dude, Gautam, you finally have gone senile. Higher purpose? In today's organizations? Heck I don't even know if I'm going to keep my job day after tomorrow and you want me to connect the cause or purpose of a role? Wake up and smell the coffee, you naive fool. I'm not sure my organization has a cause beyond making money"

And I'd say you're right.

The vast majority of organizations don't think about the desire of an individual to make a difference and meaning to others. And unless you can connect with that innately human desire - you will continue to judge a person by their current and future salary levels and they in turn will treat you as a mercenary would.

A friend of mine who was recruited by Google said that during his recruiting process he and other prospective recruits were given a presentation - and he remembered just one bullet point from that - it said something on the lines of "Whatever the job you do, remember you are going to play a part in changing the world"

Similarly and more famously when Steve Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi he asked him:

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

So are you trying to recruit people into a cause or trying to recruit mercenaries?

Company culture most important factor for Job Seekers in Auto industry, finds survey

Got an interesting information shared by my friend AK Menon whose firm Options did a survey focused on the Auto sector.

 attraction to company culture plays the most dominant part in a job seeker’s preference of a future employer. While the job seekers were divided about their most preferred future employer, irrespective of the company they voted for, the company culture was a major decision making factor.

We also found Toyota with 21% preference to be the most preferred future employer for these professionals, followed by three Indian companies viz., Tata Motors (15%), Maruti (14%) and Mahindra & Mahindra (8%). However, in the aggregated top 3 employer preferences, Tata Motors (15.6%) found more mentions than Toyota (14.3%). Interestingly, apart from culture, the top 4 companies stood for different things in the minds of the job seekers who responded to the survey. (The numbers given are in that order of preference for the respective company)

Check the full report here.

Which merits the question - if your employment brand is inextricably to your organizational culture - how do you get the message out to job seekers?

Any thoughts?

My thought is that OD and Recruiting groups need to work a lot together to translate a real and transparent approach to organizational culture.

HR Professionals' Network Crosses 1000 members

Sometime over the weekend the HR Professionals' community crossed the landmark of a 1000 members.

If you're a member please welcome the new members and make them feel welcome . Don't forget to check out the HR related events happening near you at Events and to read the thoughtful blog posts by the members of the community.

Remember, a community is fun when your friends are on it - so go ahead - click here and Invite your HR colleagues to help them network and learn.

The HR groups are jumping with activity and you can ask questions and reply to queries on the Discussion Forum.

Thinking about Social Employee Relationship Management

Many business leaders and HR professionals I meet and talk to take stances that are either on the lines of "Oh Orkut and Facebook is such a drain on my company resources and time ! I need to ban such stuff - or at least regulate it - so that we can do our jobs better"

Or (and this is a smaller number) some CEOs, COOs, HR professionals and many Marketing professionals - the ones who are more open-minded, say - "Hold on, here are some things that are changing at a fundamental level in the way we engage with the external world, and our employees are out there on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut, Twitter - talking about their jobs, our products, answering questions from their friends and strangers. If we can't ban this, how can we channelise it?"

Welcome to Social ERM

Yeah, I just coined the phrase Social ERM - and I take this off from the concept of Social CRM that Gaurav blogged about.

So what would Social Employee Relationship Management do?

1. Listening - Monitoring of the social web to keep track of what your employees are saying on various platforms about their work/ industry/market/ customers/ organizations/ other employees. 
2. Profiling - This step would involve trying to classify your employees in the following ways - 
1. What kind of postings are they carrying out? 
2. Do they respond to user queries? 
3. Do they post about new stuff that is happening in the industry/ market ? 
4. What is the influence they have built? 
5. Who is their audience?
3. Sharing and Connecting - This would look at building an online community within the firewall amongst the people you have profiled so that they can share and curate the content each of them create on different site
4. Collaboration - The next step would be for these online innovators to create content jointly or ideate on what they can work together - or to reach out to each other when faced with a external query not in their area of expertise.
5. Converting and Supporting - When one does steps 1 and 2 - one would also discover disgruntled employees - This step looks at how HR and Operations can respond to the source of that negativity so that the at least become neutral if not positive. However, I foresee companies still not being open enough to do this, but one does hope!
6. Energising and Retaining - Clearly employees who engage in social media in the work arena are excited by other rewards and recognitions than employees who are not vocal about their work. HR and Operations needs to think new ways to energise and retain these employees - and giving them augmented roles with social media responsibilities
   

So CEOs, COOs, HR professionals - are you ready for Social Employee Relationship Management?

Cross posted on the 2020 Social Blog

Building Socially connected and Collaborative organizations

Came across some great posts on driving collaboration within the organization

First there are cases studies of Heinz and Bayer where Social Media meets the Employee Handbook

For Bayer Corp, social media has become one more way for employees to share ideas within the organization or for the company to communicate with customers.
However, the company — like many others in the social media space — also recognize the need for formal policies or guidelines governing these online activities.
“It’s not as if there are brand new guides or instructions to employees, but this is another vehicle that, if they are representing the company, they need to be mindful of what proper behavior is,” said Bryan Iams, head of strategic and external communications for Bayer.

But before you take Bayer's road here's a insightful post which will cause you to think - Is your company ready for social media?

Social media has the power to democratize information and provide real-time, meaningful feedback on products and services. Are these the kinds of features that would increase your speed-to-market, improve innovation and engage your employees? Or do you worry more about threats to management structure, the security of your information and hierarchical protocol?

And this great post,  6 questions to ask to build a collaborative organization reminds me of my own post

The collaborative movement is not new – think Margaret Wheatley,  think Peter Senge, think Chris Argyris and the organisational learning movement. What’s changed is the technology, particularly anything 2.0 is now simple enough, and accessible enough for people to get it.  Before, people needed to have a really high interpersonal competence to achieve this goal of collective dialogue. Now, the norms of social communities online have introduced sharing and providing content as a given.
Bit as evidenced by the  increase in blogs, and discussion groups on the topic of why is it so hard to introduce a collaborative culture, why introducing enterprise software is fraught with challenge, why internal comms teams are struggling with uptake on collaborative tools, it can be argued that this really is just a pretty standard culture change challenge.

And why CIOs should encourage collaboration

A survey by analyst Pierre Audoin Consultants and the IT Service Management Association in September last year suggested that 68% of IT buyers now turn to their peers as their preferred source of advice on potential IT systems. That is almost double the second most popular route of searching for information on the web.
As US technology blogger and former Gartner analyst Vinnie Mirchandani recently wrote on his Deal Architect blog, "In the 1970s CIOs turned to IBM for advice; in the 1980s to Accenture (Andersen); in the 1990s to Gartner. In this decade they rely on each other - unbiased peer input."

 As S Sivakumar CEO of ITC IBD tweeted what is needed is Communication 1.0 to enable Web 2.0 in the workplace :-)

What do you think?

Facebooked Organizations?

JP at Confused of Calcutta is musing about what the Facebookisation of the Enterprise means for IT departments.

As he says:

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department?
Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Here's what I think:

The biggest benefits of the “Facebookisation” is higher employee engagement – hence it is not the IT department that would take a step ahead with that – but the Ops, Strategy and HR groups that would be asking the IT department to follow FB’s lead to create a truly hyper-linked organizaton.
The other big benefit (and this would need to be taken a call by Org Design and CEOs) is do the other systems and processes in the organization support the openness and transparency that the Facebookisation would bring. – if people are rewarded for individual behavior and if the Peformance system does not incentivise a culture of sharing and connecting – the phenomenon would be limited to the “social innovators” within the enterprise alone.


What do you think?

The Salary Negotiation

Ajay met Gautam for a cup of coffee during his visit to Delhi for the holidays. He had read Gautam's blog for the two years he had been in his MBA. He had mailed Gautam once to get some thoughts on a HR project and over the next one year they had started been in virtual touch first by email to Linkedin to Facebook.

Gautam asked "So Ajay, how is this job you're doing at Bangalore?"

Ajay replied "It's great. For someone like me just out of B-school a start-up gives great opportunities to learn - and actually come up with and implement my own ideas. I am the only Management guy in HR and I report directly to the Director of Ops. It's great!"

"Good to hear that" Gautam grinned, picking up his Americano as if to say a silent 'cheers!'

"However, Gautam, I have this dilemma - I appeared for this interview with a huge FMCG firm - and its a great role in the Corporate office looking after Performance Management for employees in the whole of the Northern Zone"

"Why would you look forward to a job change now?" Gautam asked "You just joined this IT firm from campus barely 10 months ago - and you seem to be doing well there"

Ajay said "Last year when we graduated, hardly any of the big recruiters came to campus, and the salaries we got were really low. This year the companies are visiting my campus again- and my juniors are poised to get higher salaries than me. So I don't want to miss out. This FMCG firm is also in Gurgaon and my parents are in NCR ...so it makes sense for me.."

"Hmmm... so what's the issue"

"Well I have been in three interviews and I think they really like the work I have done" Ajay said "However, they are just offering me a role at 7 lakhs and money for relocation"

Gautam asked "So what are you planning to ask them?"

"Well Gautam, my salary just increased in my firm to 7.5 lakhs, and the tax saving components are much better, so that's what I told them. And I told them I would be getting ESOPs too in the near future"

"So what did they say?"

"The person I would be reporting to didn't sound very enthusiastic - however his boss seems very keen that I should join - so am hopeful that it would work out"

They then talked about other things - and departed wishing each other a Happy New Year.

The day after next Gautam got a call from Ajay "Yes, I finally got the final offer, after negotiating - and calling the GM in HR a couple of times - up to 8 lakhs and a joining bonus of 50 thousand. They reduced my relocation amount to actuals - but I think I got myself a pretty decent deal. They said since I would be staying with my parents in Delhi I would be saving a lot - but I told them that I would be staying in Gurgaon close to the office to keep the commute to a minimum"

"So will you do that?" Gautam asked

"Yeah - absolutely"

Twitter is top job trend for 2009, says Indeed

Job Vertical Search engine in the US, Indeed posted a blog that says Twitter is the top trend of 2009 in jobs.

Check the trend graph here.

That's amazing! As the blog post says:

The emergence of social media opportunities is striking, with Twitter being the #1 growth trend along with Facebook (#4), Blogger (#6), and Social Media (#9). Other strong technology-related trends are Cloud Computing at #2 and iPhone at #3.

This is about the trends in the US. How soon do we see such trends in the Indian market?

Well, that is still some way to go, in my opinion. Social media is still a add-on to the marketing and communication industry here - and hopefully will soon start making in-roads into mainstream business needs. I foresee a strong need of social media people who would train people on how to be online community management or as Forbes India called it - taking on the new job - Chief Conversation Officer.

Far-fetched.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

A look back at 2009

2009 was a nice year for this blog.

First of all - it got a name change - from "Gautam Ghosh on HR" to "Gautam on Organizations 2.0" - reflecting my changing focus and the content that would get featured here :-)

And secondly it got its own domain too - from gauteg.blogspot.com to www.gautamblogs.com :-)

There were two recognitions for the blog, first EvanCarmichael.com listed it in the 50 HR blogs to watch in 2009 - and ended the year with BusinessPundit listed it amongst the 75 Best Business Blogs of 2009 :-)

Disqus commenting system was added to the blog. Social tools like Addthis and Tweetmeme and the wibiya toolbar (the red bar at the bottom of this page) were also added to make the content interactive for you.

Some interesting statistics:

• Visitors to the site spent an average time of 1 min 10 seconds per visit. Considering that most people spent less than 10 seconds :-) that means some folks did spend an awful lot of time here :-)
• People visit an average of 1.35 pages
• Google sent the most amount of traffic to the blog (41%) followed by direct visits, and then followed by Yahoo, Twitter and HRworld.com
• The Google Friend Connect community of the blog has 243 members currently (you can see that by looking at the social bar at the top of this page) - and the Facebook page has 321 fans so far.
• The keyword searches that led people here were: gautam ghosh, gautam ghosh blog and best companies to work for in india :-)
• Specific posts that got most traffic were old posts 10 reasons why organizations are not able to retain employees and Should software engineers go for an MBA? Of 2009's posts the big hit was Critical Skills for HR people followed by Making Organizations Social and 2009's first Carnival of HR which I hosted.
• Most visitors through the year were from India (more than 50% of visits) followed by the US ( 27%) and then UK and Canada.

Thanks for your attention during the past year - hope I am worthy of holding your attention during 2010 too :-)

Have a great new year ahead!